The workers' strikes and demonstrations that shook France at the end of autumn 1995 have illustrated both the proletariat's ability to return to the combat, but also the enormous difficulties that it encounters on the way. In the last issue of the International Review, we gave an immediate appreciation of these social movements' significance:

... the workers cannot remain passive [in the face of the brutal attacks that a crisis-ridden capitalism is dealing out to them]. They have no way out, other than to defend themselves in struggle. But to prevent the working class from entering the combat with its own weapons, the bourgeoisie has taken the lead, and has pushed the workers into a premature struggle, completely under the control of the unions. It has not left the workers time to mobilize at their own rhythm and with their own methods (...)

Thus although the recent strike movement in France reveals a deep discontent within the working class, it is above all the result of a maneuver on a very large scale by the bourgeoisie, aimed at leading the workers into a massive defeat, and above all at creating a profound disorientation in their ranks"2.

The importance of the events in France at the end of 1995

The fact that social movements in France were fundamentally the result of a bourgeois maneuver in no way reduces their importance, nor does it mean that the working class is today nothing better than a flock of sheep at the mercy of the ruling class. In particular, these events are a stinging rebuttal of all the "theories" (given abundant publicity at the time of the Stalinist regimes' collapse) on the "disappearance" of the working class, and to the variations that spoke of the "end of working class struggle", or (the "left" variety) of the "recomposition" of the class, which has supposedly dealt a serious blow to the struggle3.

The very fact and extent of the strikes and demonstrations of November-December 1995 is testimony to the class' real potential today: hundreds of thousands of strikers, several million demonstrators. However, we cannot simply be satisfied with this observation: after all, during the 1930s, we saw huge movements like the strikes of May-June 1936 in France, or the workers' insurrection against the fascist coup in Spain, on 18th July of the same year. The fundamental difference between today's class movements and those of the 1930s, is that the latter were part of a long string of working class defeats following the revolutionary wave that began during World War I, defeats which plunged the working class into the deepest counter-revolution of its history. In this context of physical, and above all political defeat, expressions of working class combativity were easily derailed by the bourgeoisie onto the rotten terrain of anti-fascism, in other words the preparation for the second imperialist massacre. We will not return here to our analysis of the historic course4, but it is necessary to state clearly here that the situation today is not the same as in the 1930s. Today's mobilizations of the working class are in no way steps towards the preparation of imperialist war. Their significance lies in the perspective of decisive class confrontations, in a capitalism plunged into irreversible crisis.

This being said, the importance of the French social movements at the end of autumn 1995 lies not so much in the workers' strikes and demonstrations in themselves, as in the size of the bourgeois maneuver that provoked them.

We can often judge the real balance of class forces from the way that the bourgeoisie acts against the proletariat. The ruling class, after all, has many means of evaluating these forces: opinion polls, police reports (in France, for example, one of the jobs of the Renseignements Genereux, ie the political police, is to "feel the pulse" of potentially dangerous sectors of the population, and in particular the working class). But the most important of them is the union apparatus, which is much more effective than all the sociologists, opinion pollsters, or police functionaries. Since this apparatus is responsible above all for controlling the exploited, in the service of capitalist interests, and has 80 years of experience in the matter, it is especially sensitive to the workers' state of mind, their readiness and ability to engage in struggle against the bourgeoisie. It is the unions' job to keep the bourgeoisie's leaders constantly informed as to the extent of the danger represented by the class struggle. And this is the purpose of the periodic meetings between union leaders and the bosses, or the government: plan together the best and most effective strategy for the bourgeoisie's attacks on the working class. In the case of the movements in France at the end of 1995, the size and sophistication of the maneuver organized against the working class are enough in themselves to show how far the class struggle, and the perspective of massive workers' combats, are a central concern for the bourgeoisie.

Bourgeois maneuvers against the working class

The article in the previous issue of this Review described in detail the various aspects of the maneuver, and how all the sectors of the ruling class, from the right to the far left, collaborated in it. Here, we will simply recall the main elements:

- starting in the summer of 1995, an avalanche of attacks (from a brutal tax hike, to a threat to the pensions of state employees, via a wage freeze for the latter, and the whole topped off with a plan for Social Security reform, the "Juppe plan" designed to increase wage earners ' subscriptions, while reducing the reimbursement of medical expenses);

- a veritable provocation directed at the rail workers, in the form of a "contract plan" between the state and the SNCF (the nationalized rail company), imposing an extra 7 years work on drivers before reaching pension rights, and thousands of job cuts;

- use of the rail workers' immediate mobilization as an "example to follow" by the other workers of the state sector: contrary to their usual practice of confining the struggle, this time the unions became zealous propagandists for their extension and succeeded in drawing in many other workers, notably in city transport, the postal service, gas and electricity, and tax offices;

- massive media coverage of the strikes, presented in a highly favorable light on the TV, and even accompanied by intellectuals signing declarations for "an awakening of society", and against "monolithic thought";

- the leftists' contribution to the maneuver, giving their total approval to the unions, reproaching them solely with not having done the same thing earlier;

- then, after three weeks of strikes, the government withdraws the "contract plan" on the railways, and the measures against state employees' pensions: the unions hail their victory and talk of a government "retreat"; despite the resistance of some of the "tough" railyards, the rail workers go back to work, giving the signal for the other sectors to end the strike.

Overall, the bourgeoisie won a victory by pushing through most of the measures which concern every sector of the working class, such as the increase in taxes and the reform of the Social Security, and even some of the measures aimed at specific sectors, such as the wage freeze for state employees. But the bourgeoisie's greatest victory was political: the workers who have just engaged in three weeks of strikes are not ready to launch a new movement when the next attacks fall. Moreover, and above all, these strikes and demonstrations have given the unions the opportunity to polish up their image considerably: whereas previously, the unions in France had the reputation of dispersing the struggle, of organizing worn-out and divisive days of action, now they appeared throughout the movement (especially the two most important of them: the Stalinist CGT and Force Ouvriere led by the Socialists) as indispensable to the movement's extension and unity, to the organization of massive demonstrations, and as responsible for the government's so-called "retreat". As we said in the article in our last Review:

In fact, the considerable importance that the bourgeoisie gave to renewing the unions' credibility was amply confirmed after the movement, especially in the press with numerous articles emphasizing the union "comeback". It is interesting to read, in one of the bourgeoisie's confidential newsheets, that it uses for talking unambiguously: "One of the clearest signs of this union recovery is the way the coordinations have volatilized. They has been seen as a testimony of the unions' inability to represent the workers. The fact that they did not appear this time shows that the unions' efforts to "stick to the terrain", and restore a "unionism close to the workers" have not been in vain"5. The same newsheet is happy to quote a declaration - presented as a "sigh of relief" - from a private sector boss: "At last we've got strong trade unions back again".

A lack of understanding in the revolutionary milieu

This is not a hasty judgment on BC's part, as a result of insufficient information, since in its January 1996 issue, BC returns to the same idea:

"The employees of the state sector mobilized spontaneously against the Juppe plan. And it is good to remember that the workers' first demonstrations took place on the terrain of the immediate defense of class interests, taking the union organizations themselves by surprise, and showing once again that when the proletariat moves to defend itself against the bourgeoisie's attacks, it almost always does so outside and against union directives. It was only in the second phase that the French unions, above all Force Ouvriere and the CGT, caught up with the movement and thus recovered their credibility in the workers' eyes. But the involvement, with such apparent radicalism, of Force Ouvriere and the other unions in fact hid the sordid interests of the union bureaucracy, which can only be understood if one knows the French system of social protection [where the unions, notably Force Ouvriere, manage me funds, which is precisely one of the things called into question by the Juppe plan].

We find a similar idea put forward by BC's sister organization within the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Parry (IBRP), the Communist Workers Organization (CWO). In no. 1, 3rd Series, of its review Revolutionary Perspectives, we read:

In the analysis of the two IBRP groups, there is much insistence on the fact the unions only sought to defend their own "sordid interests" when they called for mobilization against the Juppe plan on Social Security. Obviously, the union leaders are sensitive to their own petty interests, such an analysis of reality comes down to looking at reality through the wrong end of a telescope. It's like seeing the customary disputes between the different unions as nothing more than an expression of the competition that exists between them, without seeing the fundamental aspect: that this is an excellent way of dividing the working class. In reality, these "sordid interests" of the trades unions can only find expression within the framework of their role in capitalist society: that of the social firemen of the capitalist order; the bourgeois state's police within the workers' ranks. And if they should have to renounce their "sordid interests" in order to keep up this role, then they will do so without hesitation: their sense of responsibility in the defense of capitalist interests against the working class is impeccable. At the end of 1995, the union leaders knew perfectly well that letting Juppe put through the major part of his plan would deprive them of some of their financial prerogatives, but they kissed them in the higher capitalist interest. It is far better for the unions to be thought to be fighting their own corner (they can always take refuge behind the argument that their own strength contributes to that of the working class), than to be unmasked for what they really are: cogs in the machinery of the capitalist state.

In fact, while our comrades of the IBRP are perfectly clear on the trade unions' capitalist nature, they still express the idea, nuanced it is true7, that the unions were surprised, even outflanked, by the initiative of the working class. Nothing could be further from the truth. If there is one example during the last 10 years in France of the unions perfectly anticipating and controlling a social movement, then 1995 is it. This movement was not just controlled by the unions, they systematically provoked it, with the government's complicity, as we have seen above and analyzed at length in our previous article. And the best proof that the bourgeoisie and its union apparatus was neither "surprised" nor "outflanked", is the media coverage that the bourgeoisie in other countries immediately gave to the movement. Especially since the big strikes in Belgium 1983, which heralded the class' emergence from the demoralization and disorientation which accompanied the workers' 1981 defeat in Poland, the bourgeoisie has been careful to organize a complete international blackout around workers' struggles. Only when the struggle corresponds to a maneuver planned in advance by the ruling class, as was the case in Germany 1992, does the blackout give way to a plethora of information. In 1992, the strikes in the public sector, especially in public transport, already had the aim of "presenting the unions, which had systematically organized all the actions and kept the workers completely passive, as the real protagonists of the movement against the bosses"8. From this point of view, the movements in France at the end of 1995 were a "remake" of those stirred up by the bourgeoisie in Germany three and a half years earlier. The intense media bombardment that accompanied these movements (even in Japan, it was daily headline news on the TV) shows not only that they were planned and controlled from start to finish by the unions, but that the ruling class organized the maneuver on an international scale to strike a blow at working class consciousness in the advanced countries.

The best proof lies in the way that the Belgian bourgeoisie maneuvered in the wake of the social movements in France:

- while the media were speaking of a "new May 68" in France, at the end of November 1995, the unions launched movements exactly like those in France against the attacks on the state sector, especially against the reform of social security;

- the bourgeoisie then mounted a brutal provocation by announcing attacks of unprecedented violence against workers on the railways (SNCB) and in the national airline (Sabena); just as in France, the muons resolutely took the lead in mobilizing these two sectors, presented as the example to follow, while the rail workers were invited to follow the example of their French colleagues;

- two days later, the government and the bosses organized a new provocation at the SNCB and Sabena, with the management announcing that its austerity measures were to be maintained: the unions renewed the "hardline" struggle (confrontations between police and strikers blockading Brussels airport), and tried to spread the movement to other branches of the state sector, as well as to the private sectors, with union delegations declaring "solidarity" with the Sabena workers, and declaring that "their struggle is a social laboratory for all the workers";

- finally, at the beginning of January, the bosses once again pretended to retreat, announcing that they would open a "social dialogue" at both the SNCB and Sabena "under the pressure of the movement"; as in France, the movement ended in victory and increased credibility for the unions.

Comrades of the IBRP, do you really believe that this remarkable resemblance between events in France and in Belgium was a mere accident, and that the bourgeoisie and the unions internationally had planned none of this?

Comrades of Battaglia Comunista, when you end up writing such nonsense, then at the least you should try to draw the lessons afterwards. In particular, you should be a little more skeptical at what the bourgeoisie has to stay. If you let yourself be taken in by all the ruling class uses to try to fool the working masses, how can you claim to be the latter's vanguard?

The need for a historical analytical framework

An immediatism which allows us to understand why the groups of the IBRP, for example in 1987-88, swing between complete skepticism and an equally complete enthusiasm at the workers' struggles. In 1987, BC began by putting the struggle in the Italian schools on the same level as that of the magistrates or airline pilots, only to transform it into "a new and interesting phase in the class struggle in Italy". The CWO oscillated in the same way over the strikes in Britain during the same period12.

In January 1996, it was the same immediatism that made BC write that "The strike of the French workers, whatever the opportunist (sic) attitude of the unions, is really an episode of extraordinary importance in the recovery of the class struggle". For BC, what was sadly lacking in this struggle, to avoid its defeat, was a proletarian party. If the party - which must indeed be built for the proletariat to carry out the communist revolution - were to be inspired by the same immediatist approach as BC, than we can only fear for the fate of the revolution.

Only by turning our backs firmly on immediatism, and placing the present moments of the class struggle in their historic context, can we understand them and truly play the part of vanguard of the working class.

Obviously, this framework is the course of history , and we won't go back over it. More precisely, the framework has been defined by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes at the end of the 1980s, which we recalled briefly at the beginning of this article. At the end of the summer of 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ICC set out the new analytical framework which would allow us to understand the evolution of the class struggle:

Given the historic importance of the events that are determining it, the present retreat of the proletariat - although it doesn't call into question the historic course, the general perspective of class confrontations - is going to be much deeper than the one which accompanied the defeat of 1981 in Poland"13.

The ICC had to integrate further new and extremely important events into this framework:

These tragic events certainly put paid to the lies about the "new world order" announced by the bourgeoisie at the time of the disappearance of the Eastern bloc, which was supposed to be the main source of military tensions in the world (...) But at the same time, the great majority of the working class in the advanced countries, following a new round of bourgeois propaganda campaigns, submitted to this war with a strong sense of powerlessness, which considerably weakened its struggles. The August 1991 putsch in the USSR and the new destabilization it provoked, as well as the civil war in Yugoslavia, contributed in their turn to reinforce this feeling of powerlessness. The breakup of the USSR and the barbaric war unfolding in Yugoslavia are expressions of the advanced decomposition of capitalist society today. But thanks to all the lies spread by the media, the bourgeoisie has managed to hide the real cause of these events and present them as a further manifestation of the "death of communism" or as a question of the "right of nations to self-determination", in the face of which workers have nothing to do but be passive spectators trusting to the wisdom of their governments"14.

The horror and duration of the war in Yugoslavia, unfolding right next to the great proletarian concentrations of Western Europe has been one of major elements that explain the extent of the proletariat's difficulties at the present time. The war combines (though to a lesser extent) the damage done by the collapse of the Eastern bloc - a deep disarray and illusions among the workers - and by the war in the Gulf - a profound feeling of impotence - without, unlike the latter, revealing the crimes and barbarity of great "democracies". The war provides a clear illustration of how capitalism's decomposition, of which it is one of today's most spectacular expressions, acts as a serious obstacle to the development of the workers' struggle and consciousness.

Another aspect which needs to be emphasized, in particular because it concerns the bourgeoisie's main weapon against the workers, the unions, is the fact that we pointed out in our Theses of September 1989: "reformist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the period ahead, greatly facilitating the action of the unions". This sprang from the fact not that the workers still had any illusions in the "socialist paradise", but that the existence of a supposedly "non-capitalist" society seemed to indicate the possibility of some society other than a capitalist one. The end of these regimes was presented as the "end of history" (a term used quite seriously by certain bourgeois "thinkers"). Inasmuch as trade unionism is supposed to act on the terrain of improving workers' living conditions within capitalism, the events of 1989, aggravated by all the blows suffered by the working class since then, could only strengthen the unions, as we have seen - and which the bourgeoisie has made the most of in the social movements at the end of 1989.

The unions' lost credibility could not be restored all at once. Throughout the 1980s, they had been so discredited by their repeated sabotage of the workers' struggles, that it was difficult for them to set themselves up immediately as the intransigent defenders of the working class. Their return to the limelight was thus conducted in several stages, where they were more and more strongly presented as the vital instrument of the workers' struggle. An example of this progressive return of the unions is given by the situation in Germany, where the grand maneuvers in the public sector during the spring of 1992 still left room for the spontaneous struggles, without union instructions, of autumn 1993 in the Ruhr. By contrast, in the engineering workers' strikes at the beginning of 1995, the unions were much more firmly in the saddle. But the most significant example comes from Italy. In the autumn of 1992, the unions became the target for the great outburst of workers' anger against the Amato plan. A year later, the "mobilization" of the working class and the massive demonstrations throughout the country were led by the "factory council coordinations", in other words by the structures of rank -and- file unionism. Finally, the monster demonstration of 1994 in Rome, the biggest since World War II, was a masterpiece of union control.

To understand this renewed vigor of the trade unions, it is important to emphasize that it has been made possible by the survival of the union ideology, whose ultimate defenders are the "rank-and-file" or "fighting" unionists. In Italy, for example, the latter led the contestation of the official unions (by bringing to demonstrations the ball-bearings and rotten tomatoes that were used against the union leaders), before opening the way to the union recovery of 1994 with their own "mobilizations" during 1993. In the combats to come, once the official unions have once again been discredited by their sabotage in the service of the ruling class, the workers will still have to attack the unionist ideology represented by the rank-and-file unionists.

The bourgeoisie thus confirms what revolutionaries have always said: the crisis is the workers' best ally. It will open their eyes to the dead-end of the world today, and give it the will to overthrow it, despite all the obstacles that the ruling class will not fail to sow in its path.

FM, 12/03/96

1 "Resolution on the International Situation", adopted by the 11th Congress of the ICC, in International Review no.82.

2 International Review no.84, "Struggle behind the unions leads to defeat".

3 See our article "The proletariat is still the revolutionary class" in International Review no. 74.

4 See our article "Report on the course of history" in International Review no.18.

5 Supplement to the bulletin Entreprise et Personnel, titled "The social conflict at the end of 1995 and its probable consequences".

6 This is a mistake. The CFDT - a social-democratic union with Christian origins - approved the Juppe plan for the Social Security.

7 The CWO's tone is a good deal less optimistic than BC's: "The bourgeoisie is so confident that it will control the workers, that the Paris Stock Exchange is rising". We should add that the Franc remained stable during the entire movement. Two proofs that the bourgeoisie welcomed the movement with satisfaction. And with good reason!

8 See International Review no. 70, "Faced with chaos and massacres, only the working class can provide an answer".

9 See our article "The Wind from the East and the Response of Revolutionaries" in International Review no. 61.

10 See in particular our articles "In response to Battaglia Comunista on the course of history" and nature of a historic course: "When we talk about a "historic course and "The confusion of communist groups on the present period: the under-estimation of the class struggle", in International Review nos. 50 and 54.

11 International Review no. 54.

12 On this subject, see our article "Decantation in the proletarian political milieu and the oscillations of the IBRP" in International Review no. 55.

13 "Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern bloc countries", International Review no. 60.

14 "Only the working class can take humanity out of this barbarism", International Review no. 68.

15 Rosabeth Moss Kanter, previously director of the Harvard Business Review, quoted by Le Monde Diplomatique of March 1996.

In the three preceding articles we showed how the struggles of the working class forced capital to bring World War I to a close. In order to prevent an extension of the revolutionary struggle, capital did all in its power to divide the working class in Germany from that in Russia, to sabotage any further radicalization. In this article we want to show how revolutionaries in Germany were confronted with the question of building the organization, faced with the betrayal of the social-democracy.

The outbreak of World War I was possible only because the majority of the parties of the Second International submitted to the interests of their various national capitals. Once the unions participated unhesitatingly in the "holy alliance" with the national capital, the approval of war credits came as no surprise; it was the consequence of the whole process of degeneration of the opportunist wing of Social Democracy. Before the war, its left wing had fought with all its strength against this degeneration, so there was an immediate response to this betrayal. From the very beginning of the war the internationalists regrouped around the banner of the group that would soon become known as "Spartakus". They identified their first responsibility as the defense of working class internationalism against the betrayal of the SPD leadership. This meant not only propagandizing in favor of this programmatic position but also, and most importantly, defending the organization of the working class, whose leadership had betrayed it, from being throttled by capitalist forces. Following the betrayal of the party leadership, there was unanimous agreement on the part of all the internationalists not to allow the party to fall into the hands of the traitors. All of them worked to win back the party. None wanted to leave of their own accord, on the contrary they all wanted to work as a fraction within the party with the aim of expelling the social patriotic leadership.

The traitors' bastion was the union representatives, who had been irrevocably integrated into the state, and nothing could be reclaimed for the working class there. The SPD however was a point of resistance. Even the parliamentary fraction in the Reichstag was clearly divided between the traitors and the internationalists. Even though - as we showed in the article in International Review no 81 - it was only with great difficulty and great hesitation that a voice was raised in the Reichstag against the war. But the most potent lever against betrayal developed above all within the rank and file of the party itself.

"We accuse the Reichstag fraction of having betrayed the fundamental principles of the party and, with them, the spirit of the class struggle. The parliamentary fraction has thus placed itself outside the party; it has ceased to be the official representative of German Social-Democracy" (Leaflet of the opposition, quoted by R. Muller).

All the internationalists were agreed not to abandon the organization to the traitors. "This does not mean that immediate separation from the opportunists is desirable, or even possible, in every country. It means that such a separation is ripe historically, that it has become inevitable and that it represents a step forward, a necessity for the revolutionary struggles of the proletariat. It means that the historic turning point, marked by "peaceful" capitalism's entry into its imperialist phase, puts such a separation on the agenda" (Lenin, "Opportunism and the foundation of the Second International", Works, vol 21).

In International Review no 81 we showed that the Spartakists and the "Linksradikale" in other towns aimed at forging a balance of forces that would put the social-patriotic leadership in a minority. How could the organizational break with the traitors be brought about? Obviously the traitors and the internationalists could not coexist in the same party. One had to get rid of the other. The balance of forces had to be reversed in the course of this struggle. As we showed in International Review no 81, the Spartakists' resistance put the leadership in an increasingly difficult situation found itself; the party as a whole followed the traitors less and less. In fact the social-patriots in the leadership were forced to go onto the offensive against the internationalists in order to asphyxiate them. How were they to react to this? By slamming the door and immediately forming a new organization outside the SPD?

There were divergences on this question within the left. The social-patriots began to chase the revolutionaries out of the SPD - first from the parliamentary fraction, then from the party itself; after Liebnecht, who was excluded in December 1915, it was the turn of those deputies who had voted against the war credits to be thrown out of the parliamentary group in spring 1916. At this point there was discussion on how long it was necessary to fight for the organization.

Rosa Luxemburg's attitude was clear: "You can "leave" tiny sects and circles when they no longer suit you, to found new sects and circles. To want to free the proletarian masses from a horribly heavy and damaging yoke simply by "leaving" and to show them by this valiant example the road to follow, is just a childish dream. To have the illusion of freeing the masses by tearing up your membership card is just the other side of the coin to fetishising the party card as an illusory power. These two attitudes are just different sides of organizational cretinism (...) The decomposition of German social-democracy is part of an historic process of the broadest scope, of the general confrontation between bourgeoisie and working class, a battle ground that you cannot abandon out of disgust. We must wage this titanic battle to the bitter end. We must strain with all our united forces to break the deadly knot that official German democracy, the official free unions and the ruling class have slipped over the neck of the masses, who have been duped and betrayed. The liquidation of this pile of organized putrefaction, that today goes under the name of social-democracy, is not a private affair that depends on the personal decision of one or several groups (...) It must be sorted out as a broad public question of power by deploying all our strength" (Rosa Luxemburg, Der Kampf no 31, "Offene Briefe an Geninnungsfreunde. Von Spattung, Einheit und Austritt" , Duisberg, 6 January 1917).

"The slogan is neither split nor unite; it is not for a new party or for the old party. It is to reconquer the party from bottom to top by means of the rebellion of the masses who must take the organizations and their resources into their own hands, not in words but in deeds, by rebellion (...) The decisive combat for the party has began" (Spartakusbriefe, 30th March 1916).

The work of a fraction

While Rosa Luxemburg firmly defended the idea of remaining as long as possible in the SPD and was the most strongly convinced of the need to work as a fraction, the Bremen left began to defend the idea that an independent organization was necessary.

Up to the end of 1916, beginning of 1917. this question was not a focus of disagreement. K. Radek, one of the main representatives of the Bremen left himself said: "To propagandize for a split does not mean that we must leave the party immediately. On the contrary, we must aim to take control of all the organizations and party organs possible (...) It is our duty to remain at our posts as long as possible because the longer we remain, the greater will be the number of workers who will follow us if we are excluded by the social imperialists, who obviously understand quite well what our tactic is even if we do not state it openly (...) One of the tasks of the hour is to unite the local party organizations that are in opposition and establish a provisional leadership of an opposition that is clearly defined" (Radek, Unter eigenem Banner, p327, end of I 916) .

So it is not true that the Bremen left wanted an immediate organizational separation in August 1914. It was only from 1916, when the balance of forces within the SPD began to waver more and more, that the Dresden and Hamburg groups argued for an independent organization - even if they did not have solid organizational conceptions on this question.

An assessment of the first two years of the war showed that the revolutionaries did not allow themselves to be silenced and that none of the groups gave up their organizational independence. That is why, if they had abandoned the organization to the social patriots in 1914, they would have been throwing their principles overboard. Even in 1915, as the pressure of the workers themselves was growing, with an increasing number of acts of resistance, this was still not a reason to set up a new organization independent of and outside the SPD. As long as the balance of forces remained inadequate, as long as there was not the strength necessary to fight within the ranks of the workers and as long as the revolutionaries were still a small minority; in short, as long as the conditions for "the formation of the party" were not fulfilled, it was necessary to work as a fraction within the SPD.

A brief survey of the situation at the time shows that the shock of the party leadership's betrayal in August 1914 continued to be felt, that with the nationalism's temporary victory the working class had suffered a defeat, and that it was consequently impossible to found a new party. It was first necessary to fight for the old party, carry out the difficult work of a fraction and then prepare for the construction of a new party - but to found it immediately in 1914 was unthinkable. The working class had first to recover from the effects of the defeat of 1914. For the internationalists, neither the immediate exit from the SPD, nor the foundation of a new party was on the agenda in 1914.

In September 1916 the party's Executive Committee called a national conference of the SPD. Although the leadership manipulated the mandates given to the delegates, they nevertheless lost their hold over the opposition. The latter decided not to pay dues to the Executive. The Executive replied by excluding all those who refused to pay dues, starting with the Bremen left.

In a situation which rapidly became acrimonious, where the party's Executive Committee was increasingly challenged within the party, where the class offered more and more resistance to the war, and where the Executive had begun to make significant exclusions, the Spartakists were against leaving the SPD "piecemeal" as some of the Bremen comrades advocated with their tactic of refusing to pay dues.

E. Meyer stated: "We remain within the party only as long as we can wage a class struggle against the directive committee of the party. From the moment that we are prevented from doing this, we no longer want to stay. We are not in favor of a split" (quoted Lenin, Wohlegemuth, p 167).

The Spartakist League wanted to form an organization of the whole opposition within the SPD. This was the orientation of the Zimmerwald conference. As Lenin rightly stressed: "The German opposition still greatly lacks a solid basis. It is still dispersed, scattered in autonomous currents which lack above all a common foundation which is indispensable for its ability to act. We consider it our duty to forge the dispersed forces into an organism capable of action" (Lenin, Wohlegemuth, p 118).

As long as the Spartakists remained within the SPD as an autonomous group, they formed a political reference point fighting against the degeneration of the party, against the betrayal of a part of itself. According to the organizational principles of the workers' movement, a fraction does not have a separate existence, does not have organizational independence, it remains within the party. The independent existence of the fraction at an organizational level is only possible if it is excluded from the party.

By contrast, the other left regroupments, especially around Borchardt ("Lichtstrahlen") and in Hamburg, began to declare themselves clearly in favor of the construction of an independent organization in this phase, during 1916.

As we have shown, this wing of the left (especially that of Hamburg and Dresden) used the betrayal of the social patriotic leadership as a pretext for putting into question the need for the party in general. Out of a fear of a new bureaucratism, afraid of seeing the workers' struggle stifled by the left because of the organization, they began to reject all political organization. At the beginning this took the form of distrust in the centralized nature of the organization, a return to federalism. During this phase this was expressed by their deserting the struggle against the social patriots within the party. This was what gave birth to what would later become council communism which was to develop substantially in the years that followed.

The principle of working as a fraction, carrying on the resistance within the SPD, as was applied in Germany by the left in this period was later to serve as an example for the comrades of the Italian left scarcely ten years later, in their fight within the Communist International against its degeneration. This principle which was defended by Rosa Luxemburg and the vast majority of the Spartakists was rejected very early on by the parties of the KPD who left the organization as quickly as possible with the betrayal of the social patriots as soon as divergences arose and before there were any common measures agreed.

The different currents within the workers' movement

For more than two years of the war, the workers' movement in every country was divided into three currents. In The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution, April 1917, Lenin described these three currents in the following way.

- (...) the real internationalists who are best represented by "the Zimmerwald left". Essential distinguishing characteristic: complete rupture with social-chauvinism (...). Intransigent revolutionary struggle against one's own imperialist government and one's own imperialist bourgeoisie";

- between these two tendencies there was a third current that Lenin describes as the ""center", which hesitates between the social-chauvinists and the real internationalists.(...) The "center" swears by its great gods that it is (...) for peace, (...) and for peace with the social chauvinists. The "center" is for "unity ", the center is against a split (...) the "center" is not convinced of the need for a revolution against its own government, does not advocate it, does not carry out an intransigent revolutionary struggle, invents the most banal false perspectives, even if they have an arch-marxist ring to them, in order to avoid it".

This centrist current had no programmatic clarity but was, on the contrary, incoherent, inconsistent, ready to make any concession it could, retreated before any attempt to elaborate a program, tried to adapt itself to any new situation. It was the zone in which petty-bourgeois and revolutionary influences confronted one another. This current was in the majority at the Zimmerwald conference in 1915, and in 1916; in Germany, its numbers were considerable. At the time of the opposition's conference held on 7th January 1917, it represented the majority of the 187 delegates; only 35 delegates were Spartakists.

The centrist current itself contained a right and left wing. The right wing followed more and more closely the social-patriots while the left wing was moreopen to the intervention of the revolutionaries.

In Germany, Kautsky led this current, which united within the SPD in March 1916 under the name of "Socialdemokratische Arbeitsgemeinschaft" (SAG: Social-democratic work collective), and which was particularly strong in the parliamentary fraction. Haase and Ledebour were the main centrist deputies in the Reichstag. So there were not only the traitors and the revolutionaries but also a centrist current which drew the majority of the workers to it for some time.

"And those who avoid reality by refusing to recognize the existence of these three tendencies, who refuse to analyze them and to fight in an appropriate way for what is really internationalist, condemn themselves to inertia, impotence and error" (Lenin, "The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution", Works, vol 24, p.68).

Whereas the social patriots went on trying to inject large doses of the nationalist poison into the working class and the Spartakists waged a ferocious battle against them, the centrists oscillated between these two poles. What attitude should the Spartakists adopt towards the centrists? The wing regrouped around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht insisted that "we must hit the centrists politically", that revolutionaries must intervene towards them.

Intervention towards centrism: political clarity first, unity afterwards

In January 1916, during a conference called by those who were against the war, Rosa Luxemburg explained her position in relation to the centrists.

For her, any organizational association with the centrists within the SPD was to be excluded: "Of course unity is strength, but the unity of solid and profound convictions, not that of a mechanical and superficial addition of elements that are fundamentally divergent. Its strength is not in numbers but in the spirit, the clarity, in the determination that animates us" (R. Luxemburg, The policy of the social-democratic minority, spring 1916).

Likewise, in February 1916 Liebnecht stressed: "Not unity at any cost, but clarity above all. The path we must trace is to bring out intransigently and discuss in depth all divergences in order to reach agreement on principles and tactics with the perspective of being able to act, with the perspective of unity. Unity must not be the starting point of this fermentation process, it must be the conclusion" (Spartakusbriefe. p.112).

The cornerstone of the method of Luxemburg and the other Spartakists was the demand for programmatic clarity. By demanding programmatic solidity, refusing to be drowned politically, accepting that they be numerically scarce but remain clear in content, Luxemburg was not being sectarian, she was in continuity with the old marxist method. R. Luxemburg is not the only repository of this rigor and programmatic firmness: the same method would later be used by the comrades of the Italian left when, in analyzing the lessons of the of Russia and in the 30s, they warned against the tendency to make political concessions at a programmatic level with the sole aim of numeric growth. Perhaps Rosa Luxemburg already felt the repercussions of the new situation inaugurated by the decadence of capitalism. In the period of capitalist decadence, there can no longer exist mass parties of the working class, but only numerically smaller parties which must be solid at a programmatic level. This is why this theoretical solidification represents a compass point for the work of revolutionaries in relation to the centrists, who - by definition - oscillate and fear political clarity at the programmatic level.

When in March 1917 the centrists - after their expulsion from the SPD - wanted to found their own organization, the Spartakists recognized the need for an intervention towards them. They took up the responsibility which is that of revolutionaries towards their class. On the basis of the revolutionary development in Russia and the growing radicalization of the working class in Germany itself, the task of the Spartakists was to keep the best elements, who were under the influence of centrism, out of harm's way and push them to go forward and clarify their positions. We must conceive centrist currents such as the "social democratic work collective" (SAG) - just like a number of parties who adhered to the Communist International in March 1919 - as disparate and offering no stability or coherence.

Lenin summed up this task as follows:

"The most important failing of the whole of revolutionary marxism in Germany is the absence of an illegal organization, which follows a systematic line and educates the masses in the spirit of the new tasks: such an organization would have to take a clear position towards both opportunism and Kautskyism" (Lenin, July 1916 in Works, Vol 22).

How was this activity of a pole of reference to be carried out?

In February, the centrists proposed a conference to be held on 6/8th April 1917, with a view to founding a common organization, which would bear the name USPD (Independent Social-Democratic Party). Profound differences emerged among the internationalist revolutionaries as to how to react.

The Bremen Left took position against the revolutionary lefts taking part in this common organization. Radek thought that: "Only a clear and organized nucleus can exert any influence on the radical workers of the Center. Up until now, while we were acting on the terrain of the old party,we could get by with loose links between different left radicals. Now (...) only a radical left party, with a clear program and its own organs can gather dispersed forces, to unite them and make them grow. [We can only do our duty] by organizing the left radicals into their own party" (Karl Radek, Unter eigenem Banner, p414).

The Spartakists themselves were not united on the question. At a preparatory conference of the Spartakist League on 5th April, many delegates took position against entry into the USPD. The Spartakists aimed to attract the best elements out of the new party, and win them for the revolutionary cause.

"The Social-Democratic work collective includes in its ranks many worker elements who are on our side, either politically or by their state of mind, and who only follow the work collective by lack of contact with us, or by lack of knowledge of the real relationships within the opposition, of for some other chance reason ... " (Leo Jogisches, 25th December 1916).

"We must therefore use the new party, which will bring together greater numbers of workers, as a recruiting ground for our ideas, for the determined opposition tendency; we must then contest the work collective's political and moral influence on the masses within the new party itself; finally, we must push forward the party as a whole both by our activity in its organizations, and by our own independent actions, and eventually act against its damaging influence on the class" (Spartakus im Kriege, p184).

There were many arguments, within the Left, both for and against joining. The question posed was: should we carry out fraction work outside the USPD, or act on it from the inside? While the Spartakists' concern to intervene towards the USPD to draw away its best elements was perfectly valid, it was far more difficult to see whether this should be done "from the inside" or "from the outside".

However, the question could only be posed at all because the Spartakists rightly considered the USPD as a centrist current within the working class. It was not a bourgeois party.

We can only understand the significance of the centrist USPD, and the fact that it still possessed a great influence among the working masses, by considering the increasingly turbulent situation within the working class. A wave of strikes swept through north Germany in spring, and the Ruhr in March. In April, a series of mass strikes involving more than 300,000 workers hit Berlin. During the summer, a movement of strikes and protests affected Halle, Brunswick, Magdeburg, Kiel, Wuppertal, Hamburg, and Nuremberg. In June, the first mutinies took place in the fleet. These movements could only be stopped by the most brutal repression.

At all events, the Left was temporarily divided between the Spartakists on the one hand, and the Bremen Left and other revolutionary lefts on the other. The Bremen Left demanded the rapid formation of the Party, whereas the majority of the Spartakists joined the USPD as a fraction.

DV

As we saw in December 1995 with the maneuver orchestrated against the working class in France and more generally against the European proletariat, the bourgeoisie is always able to unite on an international scale to confront the exploited. It is quite a different matter at the level of inter-imperialist relations, where the law of the jungle claims all its rights. The "great victories for peace" which the media feted so noisily at the end of1995, are nothing but a sinister lie since in reality they are episodes in the deadly struggle between the great imperialist powers, which either goes on openly, or, more often, behind the cover of "intervention forces" such as the "Implementation Force" (I-For) in ex-Yugoslavia. The truth is that this final phase of the decline of the capitalist system, the phase of decomposition, is above all marked at the level of inter-imperialist relations by the war of each against all, a tendency which has been so dominant since the end of the Gulf war that it has for the moment almost completely replaced the other tendency inherent in imperialism in decadence the tendency towards the constitution of new imperialist blocs. Thus we have seen:

- an exacerbation of that typical expression of capitalism's historic crisis: militarism, the systematic resort to brute force in the struggle against one's rivals, bringing the daily of horror of war to ever-growing fractions of the world population, who are the powerless victims of this deadly imperialist free for all. If the US military superpower is in the vanguard when it comes to the use of force, the "great democracies" like Britain, France and - a fact of historic significance - Germany, are no less determined to follow the same course1;

- the leadership of the world's first power being more and more contested by most of its ex-allies and vassals;

- a questioning or weakening of the oldest and most solid imperialist alliances, as witness the historic break between America and Britain and the cooling of relations between France and Germany;

- the inability of the European Union to constitute an alternative pole to the US superpower, as illustrated strikingly by the divisions between the different European states over a conflict on their very doorstep - ie in ex-Yugoslavia.

It is within this framework that we can understand the evolution of an imperialist situation which is infinitely more complex and unstable than in the epoch of the two great imperialist blocs. The main traits of this situation are:

- the success of the American counter-offensive with its epicenter in ex-Yugoslavia

- the limits of this offensive, marked in particular by Britain's persistence in putting its alliance with America into question;

- the rapprochement between France and Britain at the same time as France distances itself from its German ally.

The success of the US counter-offensive

In the spring of 1995, the situation was indeed dominated by the weakening of the first world power, but it has clearly been altered since then, and since the summer of 1996 has been marked by a vigorous counter-offensive led by Clinton and his team. The formation of the RRF by Britain and France, which reduced the US to the role of a mere challenger on the Yugoslav scene, and, even more fundamentally, the betrayal by their oldest and most faithful lieutenant, Britain, seriously weakened America's position in Europe and made it vital that it respond on a level capable of reversing the decline in its world leadership. This counter-offensive, which has been waged with gusto, has been based on two fundamental assets. First, the USA's status as the only military superpower, capable of rapidly mobilizing its military forces to a degree far beyond the capacities of its rivals. The RRF was completely eclipsed by I-For, with the formidable logistics of the American army at its disposal: transport, sea-air forces, enormous firepower and military observation satellites. It was this demonstration of force which obliged the Europeans to sign the Dayton agreement. Then, solidly supported by this military force, Clinton, on the diplomatic level, played on the rivalries between the European powers most heavily committed in ex-Yugoslavia, in particular making skilful use of the opposition between France and Germany, which has recently been added to the more traditional antagonism between Britain and Germany2.

The direct presence of a strong American contingent in ex-Yugoslavia and in the Mediterranean as a whole has been a rude blow to the two states most involved in contesting American leadership : France and Britain. This is all tile more true in that both of these claim a leading imperialist status in the Mediterranean, and in order to preserve this status, they have done all they could since the beginning of the war in ex-Yugoslavia to prevent an American intervention that could only weaken their position in the Mediterranean.

Since then, the US has clearly shown itself to be master of the game in ex-Yugoslavia. It has had a certain degree of success in pressing Milosevic to loosen his ties with France and Britain, by alternating between the carrot and the stick. It has kept a strong hold over its Bosnian "proteges" by firmly calling them to order whenever they exhibit the least sign of independent behavior, as we saw with a recent coup constructed from start to finish by the USA, in which the latter loudly publicized certain links between Bosnia and Iran. The Americans are also trying to arrange the future by making a definite rapprochement with Zaghreb, since Croatia is the only force able to offer any opposition to Serbia. And, for the moment, they have been able to turn to their advantage the sharp tensions troubling their own creation, the Muslim-Croat Federation in the town of Mostar. All the evidence suggests that they allowed, or even encouraged the Croatian nationalists to seize the German administrator of the town, which led to the hurried departure of the latter and his replacement by an American mediator, a replacement called for by both the Croatian and Muslim factions. By establishing good relations with Croatia, the USA is above all targeting Germany, which is still Croatia's great protector. But even though, in doing this, they are exerting a certain pressure on Germany, they are also acting to accentuate the serious divisions in the Franco-German alliance over ex-Yugoslavia. Moreover, by maintaining a tactical and circumstantial alliance with Bonn in ex-Yugoslavia, they can hope to exert a better control over the activities of Germany, which remains their most dangerous imperialist rival. America's massive military presence severely limits German imperialism's margin of maneuver. Thus, three months after the setting up of I-For, the American bourgeoisie is in solid control of the situation and for the moment has neutralized the "banana skins" thrown down by Britain and France in order to sabotage the machinery of American power. From being the epicenter of the challenge to US world supremacy, ex-Yugoslavia has now become a point of departure for the defense of US leadership in Europe and the Mediterranean, ie in the central battleground of imperialist rivalries. Thus, the American military presence in Hungary can only constitute a threat to the traditional sphere of influence for German imperialism in eastern Europe. It is certainly no accident that significant tensions have arisen recently between Prague and Bonn over the Sudetenland, with tile US clearly supporting the Czechs. Similarly, a traditional ally of France like Rumania is bound to feel the effects of this American installation.

The position of strength acquired by the US in ex-Yugoslavia took a concrete form when tensions mounted in the Aegean between Greece and Turkey. Washington's voice was heard very quickly and almost at once the two antagonists gave way to its injunctions, even if the embers are still smoldering. But apart from the warning to these two countries, the USA above all took advantage of these events to underline the impotence of the European Union in dealing with conflicts in its own back yard, and thus to show who is the real boss in the Mediterranean. All this could hardly fail to be extremely annoying to Her Majesty's foreign minister!

But while Europe still represents the main stake in the preservation of American leadership, the US has to defend this on a more global scale as well. The Middle East in particular is a major field of maneuver for US imperialism. Despite the Barcelona summit initiated by France and the latter's attempts to reintroduce itself on the Middle Eastern scene, despite the success French imperialism has had with the Zeroual's election in Algeria, and the various attempts by Britain and Germany to stir up trouble in this US reserve, Uncle Sam has increased the pressure and has scored important points this last year. By pushing forward the Israel-Palestine agreement, (with the triumphant election of Arafat in the Palestinian regions), and by making the most of the dynamic created by the assassination of Rabin (to accelerate the negotiations between Israel and Syria), the US has tightened its grip on the region, while at the same time leaning more heavily on states like Iran which continue to contest US supremacy in tile Middle East3. We should also note that after an ephemeral and partial stabilization of the situation in Algeria thanks to the election of the sinister Zeroual, the fraction of the Algerian bourgeoisie linked to French imperialism is faced with a series of terrorist attacks behind which, via the "Islamists", lies the hand of the USA.

The world's first power against "every man for himself"

The vigorous counter-offensive of the American bourgeoisie has altered the whole imperialist scene, but it has not changed its essence. The US has clearly managed to demonstrate that it is still the only world superpower and that it will not hesitate to mobilize its formidable military machine to defend its leadership wherever it is under threat. Any imperialist power that seeks to contest American supremacy will find itself exposed to the wrath of the USA. At this level success has been total and the message has been clearly understood. However, despite winning some important battles, the US has not managed to eradicate the phenomenon which has obliged it to deploy such force: the tendency towards every man for himself which predominates on the imperialist arena. Momentarily and partially held back, but in no way eliminated this tendency continues to shake the whole arena, and is fed by the decomposition which affects the entire capitalist system. It remains the dominant tendency, the one which reigns over all imperialist relations, obliging each of the USA's imperialist rivals to challenge it either openly or covertly, even if there is no equality between the contending forces. Decomposition and its monstrous offspring, the war of each against all, has brought to its full flower that typical trait of the decadence of capitalism - the irrationality of war. This is the main obstacle confronting the world's superpower, an obstacle which can only generate more and more problems for the country that aspires to be the "gendarme of the world".

Having seen their margin of maneuver seriously limited in ex-Yugoslavia, France, Britain but also Germany will go elsewhere to continue their efforts to weaken and undermine US leadership. In this respect French imperialism has been particularly active. Almost totally squeezed out of the Middle East, France is using every means at its disposal to reinsert itself into this eminently strategic region. Basing itself on its traditional links with Iraq, it is mediating between the latter and the UN, shedding many a crocodile tear about the terrible consequences for the Iraqi population of the embargo imposed by the US. At the same time it is trying to increase its influence in Yemen and Qatar. It has no hesitation about stepping on Uncle Sam's toes, by claiming a role in the negotiations between Israel and Syria and once again offering its military services in Lebanon. It is still trying to maintain its sphere of influence in the Maghreb and has been very much on the offensive in Morocco and Tunisia, while at the same time defending its traditional spheres of influence in sub-Saharan Africa. And there, now assisted by its new British accomplice - whom it has thanked by allowing the Cameroon to join the Commonwealth, which would have been inconceivable a few years ago - it is maneuvering left, right and center, from the Ivory Coast to Niger (where it recently supported the coup d'etat) and on to Rwanda. Chased out of the latter country by the US, it is now cynically using the Hutu refugees in Zaire to destabilize the pro-American clique running Rwanda.

But the two most significant expressions of the French bourgeoisie's determination to resist the US bulldozer whatever the cost are, first, Chirac's visit to the USA and secondly the decision radically to transform France's armed forces. By going to meet the American godfather, the French president was expressing recognition of the new situation created by the USA's demonstration of force, but he was by no means there to pledge allegiance to Washington. The French president clearly asserted French imperialism's will to be independent by exalting European defense. But recognizing the fact that it is very difficult to openly oppose US military power, he was inaugurating a new strategy, based on the wooden horse trick. This is the whole meaning of the almost total reintegration of France into NATO. From now on, French imperialism will attempt to undermine the USA's "order" from the inside. The decision to transform the French army into a professional army, capable of mobilizing 60,000 men at any moment for external operations, is the other plank of this new strategy, and expresses the French bourgeoisie's determination to defend its imperialist interests, and that includes against those of the US gendarme. Here we should underline an important fact: with this wooden horse tactic, as with the reorganization of its armed forces, France has been studying keenly at the "British school". Britain has a long experience of this strategy. It joined the EEC with the essential aim of sabotaging this structure from within. Similarly, Britain's professional army has amply proved its effectiveness, since, with far fewer troops overall than the French army, during the Gulf war and the war in ex-Yugoslavia, it was able to mobilize numerically superior forces more quickly than the latter. Thus today, behind Chirac's activism on the imperialist scene, we have to recognize the more discrete presence of Britain. The French bourgeoisie's relative ability to defend its rank in the imperialist pecking order no doubt owes a lot to the sage advise of the most experienced bourgeoisie in the world and the close collaboration between these two states over the past year.

But the strength of the tendency of every man for himself, and the limits of the USA's demonstration of force, are shown most patently by the breakdown in the imperialist alliance that has united Britain and the US for nearly a century. Despite the formidable pressure exerted by the US to punish the treachery of "perfidious Albion" and pull it back towards its former bloc leader, the British bourgeoisie has stuck to its policy of distancing itself from Washington, as witness in particular its growing rapprochement with France, even if, through this alliance, Britain is also aiming to counter Germany. This policy is not supported unanimously by the whole British bourgeoisie, but the fraction incarnated by Thatcher, which calls for maintaining the alliance with the US, is for the moment very much in the minority and at this level Major has the total support of the Labor party. This rupture between London and Washington underlines the enormous difference with the situation at the time of the Gulf war when Britain was still Uncle Sam's faithful lieutenant. The defection of its oldest and most reliable ally is a real blow to the world's leading power, which cannot tolerate such an affront to its supremacy. This is why Clinton is using the old question of Ireland as a means to bring the traitor to heel. At the end of 1995, Clinton made a triumphant visit to Ireland during which he treated the world's oldest democracy like a banana republic, openly taking the side of the Irish nationalists and forcing London to put up with an American mediator in the person of Senator Mitchell. The plan concocted by the latter having been turned down by Major, Washington then went onto a higher level, using the weapon of terrorism in the form of the latest bombings by the IRA, which has become the armed wing of US dirty work on British soil. This illustrates the determination of the American bourgeoisie not to shrink from any means to get its former lieutenant to beg for mercy; but more than that, this resort to terrorism is testimony to the depth of the divorce between these two former allies and to the incredible chaos that now characterizes imperialist relations between the former members of the western bloc, despite the facade of "unbreakable friendship" between the two great democratic powers on either side of the Atlantic. For the moment, all this pressure from the former bloc leader only seems to have strengthened British imperialism's will to resist, even if the USA is far from having said the last word and will do everything it can to change the situation.

This development of every man for himself confronting the world's gendarme has recently manifested itself in a spectacular manner in Asia, to the point where we can say that a new front is opening in this region for the US. Thus, Japan is less and less the docile ally, since, freed from the constraints of the blocs, it can aspire to obtain an imperialist rank much more in conformity with its economic power. Hence its demand for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

The demonstrations against the US military presence on the Okinawa archipelago, the nomination of a new Japanese prime minister known for his anti-American diatribes and his intransigent nationalism, are witness to the fact that Japan is increasingly unwilling to put up with the American yoke and wants to assert its own imperialist interests. This can only destabilize a region where there are many latent conflicts over sovereignty, such as the one between South Korea and Japan over the small Tokdo archipelago. But the most revealing sign of the development of imperialist tensions in this part of the world is China's new aggressive attitude towards Taiwan. Looking beyond the internal motives of the Chinese bourgeoisie, which is faced with the delicate question of the succession to Deng Xiao Ping, and beyond even the Taiwan question itself, this warlike stance by Chinese imperialism means above all that it is prepared to challenge its former bloc leader, the USA, in order to defend its own imperialist prerogatives. Thus China has openly rejected Washington's many warnings, which to say the least has strained its ties to the US, with the latter being obliged to flex its muscles and dispatch an armada to the straits of Formosa. In this context of accumulating imperialist tensions and of open or covert challenges to US leadership in Asia. We can see the full significance of the rapprochement between Paris and Peking marked by the visit of H de Charette and Li Pengs invitation to Paris, as well as the holding of the first Euro-Asiatic summit. While there are definite economic motives behind this meeting, it was above all an occasion for the European Union to tread on Uncle Sam's toes, claiming to constitute the" third pole of the Europe-Asia-America triangle".

Thus. despite the firm reassertion of its supremacy, the world's gendarme is again and again faced by this wall of every man for himself. This is a real threat to its global leadership and the USA will be forced more and more to resort to brute force in response; as a result, the gendarme will become one of the main propagators of the chaos it claims to combat. This chaos, engendered by the decomposition of the capitalist system on a world scale, can only cut an increasingly destructive and murderous swathe across the whole planet.

The Franco-German alliance is put to the test

If the USA's world leadership is threatened by the exacerbation of the war of each against the growing chaos that characterizes imperialist relationships has also consigned to a more and more hypothetical future the tendency towards the formation of new imperialist blocs. This is strikingly illustrated by the turbulence through which the Franco-German alliance has been passing.

Marxism has always stressed that an imperialist alliance has nothing in common with a marriage of love or with real friendship between peoples. Self-interest alone governs such alliances and each member of an imperialist constellation aims first and foremost to defend their own interests within it and to draw the maximum profit from it. All this applies perfectly to the "motor of Europe" which the Franco-German couple used to be, and explains why it is essentially France which has been the one to start cooling off. In fact, the vision of this alliance has never been the same on the two sides of the Rhine. For Germany, things are simple. The leading economic power in Europe, handicapped by its weakness at the military level, Germany has every interest in an alliance with a European nuclear power, and this could only be with France, since Britain, despite its break with the US, remains its sworn enemy. Historically, Britain has always fought against the domination of Europe by Germany, and since reunification, the increased weight of German imperialism in Europe has only strengthened Britain's determination to oppose any German leadership of the European continent. France has often hesitated about opposing German imperialism: in the thirties, certain fractions of the French bourgeoisie were rather inclined towards an alliance with Berlin. For its part, however, Britain has always been against any imperialist constellation dominated by Germany. In the face of this historic antagonism, the German bourgeoisie has no other choice in Western Europe and it feels all the more at ease in its alliance with France in that, for all the pretensions of the "Gallic cock", it knows that it is in the stronger position. Hence the pressure it has mounted on a more and more recalcitrant ally can only have the goal of forcing it to remain faithful.

It is a very different matter for the French bourgeoisie, for whom allying itself with Germany was above all a means of controlling the latter, while hoping to exert a kind of co-leadership in Europe. The war in ex-Yugoslavia and more generally the rise of German power shattered this utopia entertained by the majority of the French bourgeoisie, who now beheld the return of the specter of "Greater Germany", haunted as they are by the memory of three wars lost to their too-powerful German neighbor.

This development of a tight collaboration between France and Britain can only weaken of the Franco-German alliance. This may in part correspond to the interests of the USA, by considerably postponing the prospect of a new bloc dominated by Germany, but it is totally against the interests of the latter. The radical reorientation of the army and military industry decided on by Chirac, while expressing the capacity of the French bourgeoisie to draw the lessons of the Gulf war and the serious reverses suffered in ex-Yugoslavia, and thus to respond to the general necessities confronting French imperialism in the world-wide defense of its positions, is also aimed directly at Germany, at several levels:

- despite Chirac's proclamations that nothing would be done without close consultation with Bonn, the German bourgeoisie has been presented with a fait accompli. France has merely communicated its decisions and does not expect any comeback;

- through the creation of a professional army and through giving priority to its external operations forces, France is clearly signaling its desire for autonomy from Germany and has facilitated the conditions for joint interventions with Britain, since while the German army is essentially based on conscription, the French army is going to be based on the British model, built around a professional corps;

- finally, the Eurocorps, symbol par excellence of the Prance-German alliance, is directly ilireatened by this reorganization; the group responsible for defense in the dominant party of the French bourgeoisie, the RPR, is demanding its abolition pure and simple.

The more the capitalist system sinks into decomposition, the more inter-imperialist relations are marked by a growing chaos, breaking up the oldest and most solid alliances and unleashing the war of each against all. The resort to brute force on the part of the world's first power is not only proving powerless to hold back this advance into chaos, but is becoming a supplementary factor in propagating the leprosy which is eating away at the imperialist system. The only real winners in this infernal spiral are militarism and war, which like Moloch demand more and more victims to satisfy their frightful appetites. Six years after the collapse of the eastern bloc, which was supposed to usher in an "era of peace", more than ever the only alternative is the one outlined by the Communist International at its first Congress: "socialism or barbarism".

RN 10.3.96

1 The decline in military budgets which is supposed to be part of the "peace dividend", far from expressing a real disarmament such as that following World War I, is really a gigantic reorganization of military forces aimed at making them more effective, more murderous, in the context of the new imperialist situation created by the formidable development of every man for himself.

2 The USA did not hesitate to tactically get the support of Germany, via Croatia (see International Review no.83).

3 The recent series of bombings in Israel, whoever ordered them, can only play to the advantage of the USA' rivals. The latter was not deceived when it immediately pointed the finger at Iran and summoned the Europeans to break all relations with this "terrorist state", which is no small nerve on the part of a state which is using terrorism very widely, from Algeria to London via Paris! The response of the Europeans was unambiguous: no. In a general way, terrorism, once the classic weapon of the weak, is now more and more being used by the great powers in the deadly struggle amongst themselves. This is a typical expression of the chaos engendered by decomposition.

4 Similarly, concerning the vision of Europe's future, France has clearly distanced itself from the federal vision defended by Germany, moving closer to the schema upheld by Britain.

In part two of this article, we will concentrate on the way Bakunin' s Alliance went about taking over and destroying the International. We will try to show the tactics used against the workers' movement as concretely as possible, basing ourselves on the analysis made by the International itself. We are convinced that the identification of these tactics of the bourgeoisie and of parasitism, the drawing of the lessons of the fight against Bakuninism, are indispensable for the defense of the revolutionary milieu today.

The war of capital against the International

From the outset, the bourgeoisie used its police, courts, prisons, and later its execution squads against the International. But this was not its most dangerous weapon. Indeed, the Hague Congress showed how "the IWA, the representative of labor, grew all the stronger as persecutions increased" (The Hague Congress of the First International,Minutes and Documents, Progress Publishers, Moscow p.146).

The bourgeoisie's most dangerous weapon was precisely the attempt to destroy the International from within, through infiltration, manipulation and intrigue. This strategy consists in provoking suspicion, demoralization, divisions and open splits within a proletarian organization, in order to make it destroy itself. Whereas repression always carries the risk of provoking the solidarity of the working class with the victims, destruction from within is capable, not only of destroying a proletarian party or group, but of ruining its reputation and thus erasing it from the collective memory and traditions of the working class. More generally speaking, it aims at slandering organizational discipline, at presenting the struggle against police infiltration, the fight against the ambitions of the declassed elements of the ruling class to take over and destroy proletarian groups, the resistance against petty bourgeois individualism, as a "dictatorship" or as the "administrative elimination of rivals. "

Before showing how the bourgeoisie with the help of political parasitism, in particular Bakuninism, went about this work of destruction and denigration, we will briefly recall the nature of the fear provoked within the bourgeoisie by the International.

The bourgeoisie feels threatened by the International

Thus, on the eve of the plebiscite with which Louis Napoleon prepared his war against Prussia, the Paris members of the International, under the pretext of having taken part in a plot to assassinate Louis Bonaparte, were arrested on the 23rd of April, 1870. Simultaneous arrests of Internationalists took place at Lyon, Rouen, Marseilles, Brest and other towns.

With the capitulation of Sedan, when the second empire ended as it began, by a parody, the French-German War entered upon its second phase. It became war against the French people ... From that moment she found herself compelled not only to fight the Republic in France, but simultaneously the International in Germany" (Report of the General Council to the Hague Congress, Minutes and Documents, p.213)

"If the war against the International had been localized, first in France (...) then in Germany (...) it became general since the rise, and after the fall, of the Paris Commune. On the 6th of June, 1871, Jules Favre issued his circular to the Foreign Powers demanding the extradition of the refugees of the Commune as common criminals, and a general crusade against the International as the enemy of family, religion, order and property" (ibid p.215).

By the time of the Paris Commune, at the latest, all sectors of the ruling classes had realized the mortal danger which international socialist organization posed to their rule. Although the International could not itself play a leading role during the events of the Paris Commune, the bourgeoisie was perfectly aware that this uprising, the first attempt of the working class to destroy the bourgeois state and replace it with its own class rule, would not have been possible without the political and organizational autonomy and maturity of the proletariat - a maturity which the International represented.

Moreover, it was the political menace which the very existence of the International posed for the long term domination of capital which to a large extent explained the savagery with which the Paris Commune was jointly repressed by the French and German states.

After the Paris Commune: the bourgeoisie tries to break up and discredit the IWA

In fact, as Marx and Engels were just beginning to realize at the time of the famous Hague Congress in 1872, the defeat of the Paris Commune and of the French proletariat as a whole spelled the beginning of the end of the International. The association of the leading sectors of the European and American workers, founded in 1864, was not an artificial creation, but the product of the international upswing of the class struggle at that time. The crushing of the Commune spelled the end of this upsurge, opening a period of defeat and political disarray. Just as the Communist League had fallen prey to a similar disarray after the defeat of the revolutions of 1848-49, with many of its members refusing to recognize that the revolutionary period was over, the International after 1871 was entering a period of decline. In this situation, the principle concern of Marx and Engels became to allow the International to conclude its work in good order. It was with this in mind that, at the Hague Congress, they proposed transferring the General Council of the IWA to New York, where it would be out of the front line of bourgeois repression and internal feuds. They wanted above all to preserve the reputation of the Association, to defend its political and organizational principles, so that they could be passed on to future generations of revolutionaries. In particular, the experience of the First International should serve as a basis for the construction of a Second International as soon as the objective conditions allowed.

For the ruling classes, however, there was no question of allowing the International to conclude its work in good order, to let it pass on the lessons of its first steps in international centralized organization on the basis of statutes to future proletarian generations. The slaughter of the Paris workers was the signal for bringing to a conclusion the whole work of internal undermining and discrediting which had already begun long before the Commune. The most intelligent representatives of the ruling classes feared that the First International would go down in history as a decisive moment in the adoption of marxism by the workers' movement. One such intelligent representative of the exploiters was Bismarck, who throughout the 1860s had secretly, and sometimes openly, supported the Lassalleans within the German workers' movement in order to combat the development of marxism. But there were others, as we shall see, who joined together to disrupt and wreck the political vanguard of the working class.

Bakunin's Alliance, the main weapon in Capital's war against the International

Bakunin had failed in his original scheme to unite the International with the bourgeois League for Peace and Freedom under his own control, his propositions having been refused by the general congress of the whole International in Brussels. Bakunin explained this defeat to his bourgeois friends of the League as follows: "I could not have foreseen that the Congress of the International would reply with an insult as gross as it was pretentious, but this was due to the intrigues of a certain clique of Germans who detest the Russians and everybody except themselves" (Bakunin's letter to Gustav Vogt of the League, quoted in the documents of the Hague Congress p.388).

Regarding this letter, Nicolai Utin, in his report to the Hague Congress, pointed out one of the central aspects of Bakunin 's politics. Instead of openly attacking the program and statutes of a proletarian organization, he makes a personal attack against certain members of its central organs, accusing them of wielding a personal dictatorship.

"It proves that it is to that time, if not earlier, that Bakunin's calumnies date, against citizen Marx, against the Germans, and against the whole of the International, which was already accused then,and a priori - since Bakunin had no knowledge at that time either of the organization or of the activity of the Association - of being a blind tool in the hands of Citizen Marx, of the German clique (later distorted by Bakunin's supporters into an authoritarian clique of Bismarckian minds); to that time also dates Bakunin's rancorous hatred of the General Council and above all of certain of its members" ("Utin's Report to the Hague Congress, presented by the Investigation Commission on the Alliance", Minutes and Documents p.388).

This approach is fundamental to political parasitism. Instead of confronting its opponents openly, and on a political terrain, it spreads personal calumnies behind the back of proletarian organs. These attacks are aimed against certain persons seen as particularly staunch defenders of the statutes of such organizations. More generally, they serve to whip up a general feeling of suspicion within and around the organization under attack. At the same time, this approach reflects the feeling of the likes of Bakunin that since we conspire on the basis of personal politics, our opponents probably do too.

However, the Alliance's first application for membership had to be refused, since its organizational practice did not conform to the statutes of the Association.

"The General Council refused to admit the Alliance as long as it retained its distinct international character; it promised to admit the Alliance only on the condition that the latter would dissolve its special international organization, that its sections would become ordinary sections of our Association, and that the Council should be informed of the seat and numerical strength of each new section formed" (ibid).

This latter point was insisted on by the General Council to prevent the Alliance entering the International secretly, under different names.

The Alliance replied: "The question of dissolution has today been decided. In communicating this decision to the various groups of the Alliance, we have invited them to follow our example and constitute themselves into sections of the International Working Men's Association, and seek recognition as such either from you or from the Federal Councils of the Association in their respective countries" (ibid p.349, quoted by Engels in his report).

However, the Alliance did nothing of the kind. Its sections neither declared their location and numerical strength, nor did they openly apply for membership in their own name.

"The Geneva section proved to be the only one to request admission to the International. Nothing was heard about other allegedly existing sections of the Alliance. Nevertheless, in spite of the constant intrigues of the Alliancists who sought to impose their special program on the entire International and gain control of our Association, one was bound to accept that the Alliance had kept its word and disbanded itself. The General Council, however, has received fairly clear indications which forced it to conclude that the Alliance was not even contemplating dissolution and that, in spite of its solemn undertaking, it existed and was continuing to function as a secret society, using this underground organization to realize its original aim - the securing of complete control" ("Report to the Hague Congress", ibid, p.349).

In fact, at the moment the Alliance declared its dissolution, the General Council did not possess sufficient proofs to justify a refusal to admit it to the International. And it had been "misled by some signatures on the program which gave the impression that the Alliance had been recognized by the Romance Federal Committee" ("The Alliance and the IWA", Minutes and Documents p.522).

But this had not been the case, since the Romance Federal Committee did not trust the Alliancists one inch, and with good reason.

"The secret organization hidden behind the public Alliance now went into full action. Behind the International's Geneva section was the Central Bureau of the Secret Alliance: behind the International's sections of Naples, Barcelona, Lyons and Jura lay the secret sections of the Alliance. Relying on this freemasonry, whose existence was suspected neither by the mass of the International's membership nor by their administrative centers, Bakunin hoped to win control of the International at the Basle Congress in September 1869" (ibid p.522-523).

To this end, the Alliance began to set in motion its secret international apparatus.

"The secret Alliance sent instructions to its adherents in every corner of Europe, directing them whom to choose as delegates and to whom to give a mandate if they could not send one of their own men. In many areas members were very surprised indeed to find that for the first time in the history of the International the selection of delegates was not being carried out in a straightforward, open, matter-of-fact way, and letters reached the General Council asking what was in the wind" (Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, p.31l).

At the Basle Congress. the Alliance failed to achieve its main goal: that of transferring the General Council from London to Geneva, where Bakunin expected to be able to dominate it. The Alliance did not give up: it changed tactics.

"Right from the start the activities of the Alliance fall into two distinct phases. The first is characterized by the assumption that it would be successful in gaining control of the General Council and thereby securing supreme direction of our Association. It was at this stage that the Alliance urged its adherents to uphold the "strong organization" of the International and, above all, "the authority of the General Council and of the Federal Councils and Central Committees"; and it was at this stage that gentlemen of the Alliance demanded at the Basle Congress that the General Council be invested with those wide powers which they later rejected with such horror as being authoritarian" ("Report on the Alliance", Minutes and Documents p.354).

Only after their defeat at Basle did the Bakuninists unfurl the flag of anti-authoritarianism throughout the International. This shows that for the Alliance, taking over control of the International was its essential goal, whereas its "program" was secondary, a mere means to an end. For Bakunin himself, who propagated authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism, peasant revolution and worship of the Russian Czar, proletarian internationalism and rabid pan-slavism, depending on whom he was addressing himself to, questions of programmatic principles were quite irrelevant.

The bourgeoisie assists Bakunin's work of sabotage

In part one of this article, on the pre-history of Bakunin's conspiracy, we have already indicated the class nature of his secret society. Even if the majority of its members were not aware of the fact, the Alliance represented nothing less than a Trojan horse through which the bourgeoisie attempted to destroy the International from within.

Bakunin's attempt to take control of the IWA at the Basle Congress, not even a year after joining it, was only possible because he was assisted by the bourgeoisie. This assistance provided him with a political and organizational power base even before he joined the International.

Fanelli was a long standing member of the Italian parliament with the most intimate connections with the highest representatives of the Italian bourgeoisie.

The second bourgeois origin of Bakunin's power base was thus his linkage to "influential circles" in Italy. In October 1864, in London, Bakunin told Marx he was going to Italy to work for the International, and Marx wrote to Engels to say how impressed he was by this intention. But Bakunin was lying.

"Through Dolfi he was introduced into the society of the Freemasons where the Fee thinking elements of Italy were united", as Bakunin's German aristocratic admirer and biographer Richarda Huch tells us (Huch: Bakunin und die Anarchic, p.147). As we saw in part one of this article. Bakunin, who left London for Italy in 1864 took advantage of the absence of the International in that country to prepare sections there under his own control and after his own image. Those who, like the German Cuno who founded the Milan section, opposed the domination by the secret "brotherhood", were conveniently arrested or deported by the police at decisive moments.

Commenting on this, the report adds: "The Holy Father is right. The Alliance in Italy is not a "workers' union" but a rabble of declasses. All the so-called sections of the Italian International are run by lawyers without clients, doctors with neither patients nor medical knowledge, students of billiards, commercial travelers and other tradespeople, and principally journalists from small papers with a more or less dubious reputation. Italy is the only country where the International press - or what calls itself such - has acquired the characteristics of Le Figaro. One need only glance at the writing of the secretaries of these so-called sections to realize that it is the work of clerks or professional authors. By taking over all the official posts in the sections in this way, the Alliance managed to compel the Italian workers, each time they wanted to enter into relations with one another or with the other councils of the International to resort to the services of declasse members of the Alliance who found in the International a "career" and a "way out"" ("The Alliance and the IWA", Minutes and Documents p.556).

It was thanks to this infrastructure coming from the League that organ of the West European bourgeoisie influenced by the secret diplomacy of the Russian Tsar and from the "free-thinking" and "masonic" Italian bourgeois declassed riff-raff, that Bakunin could launch such a strong attack against the International.

Thus, it was after the Berne Congress of the League of Peace (September 1868) that the above mentioned Fanelli, Italian member of parliament and founding member of the Alliance, was sent to Spain "furnished with references by Bakunin for Garrido, deputy at the Cortes who put him in touch with republican circles,bourgeois and working class alike" in order to set up the Alliance on the Iberian peninsula. ("The Alliance and the IWA", ibid p.537). Here we see the typical methods of the "abstentionist" anarchists allegedly refusing to have anything to do with "politics".

It was through such methods that the Alliance spread itself in those parts of Europe where the industrial proletariat was still extremely underdeveloped: Italy and Spain, the south of France and the Jura mountains in Switzerland. Using such methods, at the Basle Congress "thanks to its dishonest methods, the secret Alliance found itself represented by at least ten delegates including the famous Albert Richard and Bakunin himself ("The Alliance and the IWA", p.523).

But all these Bakuninist sections secretly dominated by the Alliance were not in themselves sufficient. In order to take control of the International, it was necessary for Bakunin and his followers to be accepted by, and take control of, one of the already established, oldest and most important sections of the Association. Coming from the outside, Bakunin realized the need to invest himself with the authority of such a section already widely recognized inside the organization. This is why Bakunin had from the outset moved to Geneva, where he founded his own "Geneva Section of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy". Even before the open conflict with the General Council began, it was here that the first decisive resistance of the International to Bakuninist sabotage began.

The battle for control of the Swiss-Romance Federation

"But in December 1868 the Alliance of Socialist Democracy had just been formed in Geneva and declared itself a section of the IWA. This new section asked three times in fifteen months for admission to the group of Geneva sections, and three times was refused, first by the Central Council of all the Geneva sections and then by the Romance Federal Committee. In September 1869, Bakunin, the founder of the Alliance, was defeated at Geneva when he stood as candidate for the delegation to the Basle Congress. and his candidature was rejected, the Geneva members appointing Grosselin as their delegate. The discussions begun then (...) by Bakunin's supporters led by himself to force Grosselin to resign and give way to Bakunin - these discussions must have convinced Bakunin that Geneva was not a favorable place for his scheming. At their meetings the Geneva workers did not conceal their dissatisfaction. Their scorn for his high sounding words. This fact, together with other Russian matters, provided the motive for Bakunin's voluntary departure from Geneva" ("Utin's Report", ibid p.378).

At a time when the General Council in London was still acting very hesitantly, admitting the Alliance against its own better judgment, the workers' sections in Switzerland were already openly resisting Bakunin's attempts to impose his will in violation of the statutes. Whereas bourgeois historians, true to their vision of history made by "great individuals", portray the struggle in the International as a contest "between Marx and Bakunin", and whereas the anarchists present Bakunin as the innocent victim of Marx, the very first battle against the Bakuninists in Switzerland immediately reveals that this was a struggle by the whole organization in its own defense.

However, this proletarian resistance to Bakunin's open attempts at a takeover did not prevent him from splitting the Swiss sections. Behind the scenes, Bakunin had already begun to gain his own peronal supporters in the country. These he gained mainly through non-political means of persuasion, in particular the charisma of his own personality, with which he conquered the Locle Internationalist section in the Jura watch-making region. Locle had been a center of resistance to the Lassallean policy of support for the conservatives against the bourgeois radicals pursued by Coullery, the opportunist pioneer of the International in Switzerland. Although Marx and Engels were the most prominent opponents of Lassalle in Germany, Bakunin told the artisans in Locle that the rottenness of Coullery's politics was the result of the authoritarianism of Marx within the International, so that a secret society was necessary to "revolutionize" the Association. The local branch of the secret Alliance led by Guillaume became the couspirational center from which the struggle against the Swiss International was directed.

Bakunin's supporters were scarcely represented in the industrial towns, but had a strong presence among the artisan craftsmen of the Jura. They now split the Chaux-de-Fonds Congress of the Romance Federation around their attempts to oblige the Geneva section to admit the Alliance, and to take the Federal Committee and the editorial board of the press away from Geneva to be placed in the hands of Bakunin's right hand man Guillaume in Neuchatel. The Bakuninists completely sabotaged the Congress agenda, admitting discussion on no other point except the matter of the Alliance. Unable to impose their will, the Alliancists broke off from the Congress, moved to a nearby cafe, and immediately entitled themselves "Congress of the Romance Federation" and appointed "their own" Romance Federal Committee - in open breach of articles 53, 54 and 55 of the Federation's statutes.

Face with this coup, the Geneva delegation declared that "it was a matter of deciding whether the Association wished to remain a federation of working men's societies, aiming at the emancipation of the workers by the workers themselves, or whether it wished to abandon its program in face of a plot formed by a few bourgeois with the evident aim of seizing the leadership of the Association by means of its public organs and its secret conspiracies" ("Utin's Report", ibid p.383).

With this, the Geneva delegation had immediately grasped the entirety of what was going on.

Indeed, the split which the bourgeoisie longed for had been achieved.

In Germany there was the struggle between the true Internationalists and the blind followers of Schweizer, but that struggle did not go beyond the borders of Germany, and the members of the International in all countries soon condemned that Prussian government agent, though at first he was well masked and seemed to be a great revolutionary.

In Belgium an attempt to misuse and exploit our Association was made by a certain Mr. Coudray, who also seemed at first to be an influential member, highly devoted to our cause, but in the end turned out to be nothing but a schemer whom the Belgian Federal Council and sections soon dealt with despite the important role which he had managed to assume.

With the exception of this fleeting incident the International was progressing like a real family of brothers animated by the same strivings and having no time to waste in idle and personal disputes.

In the same issue La Solidarite foretold that there would soon be a profound split between the reactionaries (the Geneva delegates to the Chaux-de-Fonds Congress) and several members of the Geneva Building Workers' Section. At the same time posters appeared on the walls in Geneva signed by Chevalley, Cognon, Heng and Charles Perron [well known Bakuninists] announcing that the undersigned had arrived as delegates from Neuchatel to reveal to the Geneva members of the International the truth about the Chaux-de-Fonds Congress. This was logically equivalent to a public accusation against all the Geneva delegates, who were thus treated as liars hiding the truth from the members of the International.

The Swiss bourgeois newspapers then announced to the world that there was a split in the International" ("Utin's Report", Minutes and Documents p.376, 377).

The stakes in this first great battle were enormous for the International, but also for the Alliance, since its failure to be accepted in Geneva "would prove to all the members of the International in other places that there was something abnormal about the Alliance (...) and this would naturally undermine, paralyze the "prestige" that the founder of the Alliance was dreaming of for his creation and the influence which it was to exert above all outside of Geneva.

On the other hand, if it was a nucleus recognized and accepted by the Geneva and Romance group, the Alliance could, according to its founder's plan, usurp the right to speak in the name of the whole of the Romance Federation, which would necessarily give it great weight outside Switzerland ...

Confronted with this situation, Bakunin remained true to his destructive principle: one must split what one cannot take over.

"Nevertheless, the Alliance continued to insist on joining the Romance Federation which was then forced to decide on the expulsion of Bakunin and the other ringleaders. And so there were now two Romance Federal Committees, one at Geneva. the other at La Chaux-de-Fonds. The vast majority of the sections remained loyal to the former, while the latter had a following of only fifteen sections, many of which (...) one by one ceased to exist" ("Utin's Report", ibid p.526).

The Alliance now appealed to the General Council to decide which of the two should be considered as the true central organ, hoping to profit from the name Bakunin and from the ignorance of Swiss affairs assumed to reign in London. But as soon as the General Council pronounced in favor of the original federation of Geneva. calling on the La Chaux-de-Fonds group to transform itself into a local section, London was immediately denounced as "authoritarian" for meddling in Swiss affairs.

The London Conference 1871

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the class struggles in France leading to the Paris Commune of 1871, the organizational struggle within the International receded into the background, without however disappearing. The defeat of the Commune, and the new quality of the attacks of the bourgeoisie, soon made it necessary to redouble all the measures of defense of the revolutionary organization. By the time of the London Conference (September 1871), it was becoming clear that the IWA was being attacked in a coordinated manner from without and within, and that in reality the bourgeoisie was the coordinator.

Only a few months previously, this had been less clear. "When material dealing with the Bakuninist organizations fell into the hands of the Paris police as a result of the arrests in May 1871, and the public prosecutor announced in the press that a secret society of conspirators existed besides the official International. Marx believed it to be one of the usual police forgeries". "Its the old tomfoolery" he wrote to Engels. "In the end the police won't even believe each other any more"" (Karl Marx: Man and Fighter p.315).

In September 1871, the London Conference, held in the teeth of international repression and slanders, proved equal to its task. For the first time ever, the international, internal, organizational questions dominated an international meeting of the Association. The conference adopted the proposition of Vaillant, insisting that the political and the social questions are two sides of the same task of the proletariat to destroy class society. The documents, in particular the resolution "On the Political Action of the Working Class" drawing the lessons of the Commune, showing the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat and for a separate working class party were a blow against the political abstentionists: "those assistants of the bourgeoisie whether consciously or not", as was pointed out at the conference (Die Erste International Vol.2 p.143).

At the organizational level, this struggle was concertized by the reinforcement of the responsibilities of the General Council. giving it the power if necessary, to suspend sections between international congresses. It was concertized by the resolution against secret societies, outlawing their existence within the organization. And it was concertized by the resolution against the activities of Nechayev, a collaborator of Bakunin in Russia. The Russian Nikolai Utin, since he was able to read all the documents of the Bakuninists in Russian, was commissioned by the Conference to draw up a report on this latter question. Since this report threatened to expose the whole Bakuninist conspiracy, much was undertaken to prevent it being drawn up. After an attempt of the Swiss authorities to expel Utin had to be withdrawn in the face of a massive public campaign by the International, an (almost successful) assassination attempt against Utin was made in Zurich by the Bakuninists.

Hand in hand with this bourgeois violence went the Sonvillier circular of the Bakuninist Jura Federation attacking the London Conference. This open attack had become all the more necessary for the Alliance, since the London Conference had brought the manipulations of Bakunin's followers in Spain out into the open.

"Even the most devoted members of the International in Spain were led to believe that the program of the Alliance was identical to that of the International, that this secret organization existed everywhere and that it was almost the duty of all to belong to it. This illusion was destroyed by the London Conference, where the Spanish delegate, himself a member of the Central Council of the Alliance in his country, could convince himself that the contrary was the fact, and also by the Jura circular itself, whose bitter attacks and lies against the Conference and the General Council were immediately taken up by all the organs of the Alliance. The first result of the Jura circular in Spain was the emergence of disagreements within the Spanish Alliance between those who were first and foremost members of the International and those who would not recognize it, since it had not come under Alliance control" ("Report on the Alliance", Minutes and Documents, p.355-356).

The Alliance in Russia: provocation in the interests of reaction

The "Nechayev affair" dealt with at the London Conference risked totally discrediting the International and thus menacing its very existence. During the first public political trial in Russian history, in July 1871, 80 men and women were accused of belonging to a secret society which had usurped the name of the IWA. Nechayev, who claimed to be an emissary of a so-called International Revolutionary Committee allegedly working for the International, obliged Russian youth to engage in a series of frauds, and forced some of them to assist in the murder of one of their members, who had been found guilty of doubting the existence of Nechayev's all powerful committee. This Nechayev, who escaped from Russia leaving these young revolutionaries to their fate, and went to Switzerland where he also engaged in blackmail, and tried to set up a gang to rob foreign tourists, was the direct collaborator of Bakunin. Behind the back of the Association, Bakunin had supplied Nechayev not only with a "mandate" to act in the Association's name in Russia, but also with an ideological justification for his acts. This was the "Revolutionary Catechism" based on the morality of Jesuitism so much admired by Bakunin, according to which the end justifies any means whatever, including lies, murder, extortion, blackmail, the elimination of comrades who "get in the way" etc.

In the fourth part of this series we will come back to Bakunin's Russian activities in more detail. Here, it is essential to understand the role they played in Bakunin's war against the International.

On the practice of sending ultra-radical proclamations by post to Russia, even to unpolitical people, Utin wrote: "Since letters are opened by the secret police in Russia, how could Bakunin and Nechayev seriously suppose that proclamations could be sent to Russia in envelopes to persons, known or unknown, on the one hand without compromising those persons and on the other hand without risking running up against a spy?" (Minutes and Documents, p.416).

We consider the explanation for this given by Utin's report to be the most likely.

In other words, by provoking the arrest of so many people in this way, and thus making Western Europe believe that he was the leader of a vast and audacious revolutionary organization in Russia, Bakunin intended to crown his attempts to present himself as Europe's greatest revolutionary deserving to lead the International.

Since, as Marx and Engels often pointed out, the Russian political police at home, and its "brotherhood" of agents abroad, was internationally the most formidable of its day, with agents in every radical political movement throughout Europe, it can be assumed that this so-called "third department" knew of Bakunin' s plans and tolerated them.

Conclusion

The construction of revolutionary proletarian organizations is not a peaceful process. It is a permanent struggle in the face, not only of the intrusions of petty bourgeois and other intermediate and declassed influences and attitudes, but of planned sabotage organized by the class enemy. The First International's struggle against this sabotage on the part of the Alliance is one of the most important organizational struggles in the history of the workers' movement. This struggle is full of lessons for today. The assimilation of these lessons is more vital than ever if the defense of the revolutionary milieu and the preparation of the class party is to succeed. These lessons are all the more relevant, since they have been formulated in a most concrete manner, and with the direct participation of the founders of scientific socialism, Marx and Engels. The whole struggle against Bakunin is a single lesson in the application of the marxist method to the defense and construction of communist organization. It is in assimilating these examples set by our great predecessors that the present generation of revolutionaries, still suffering from the break in organic continuity with the past workers' movement caused by the Stalinist counter-revolution, can more firmly place themselves in the tradition of this great organizational struggle. The lessons of these struggles waged by the IWA, by the Bolsheviks, by the Italian Left and others are an essential arm in the present struggle of marxism against the circle spirit, liquidationism and political parasitism. This is why we consider it necessary to go into very concrete detail in order to show the reality of this struggle in the history of the workers' movement.

KR

How Revolutionaries saw the question at the end of the 19th Century

In the last article in this series we showed that, contrary to the doubt raised by many self-professed "communists", the fundamental aim of the socialist parties of the late 19th century was indeed socialism - a society without commodity relations, classes, or a state. In this sequel we will examine how the authentic socialists of that time envisaged the way that the future communist society would tackle some of mankind's most pressing social problems: in this case, the relationship between man and woman and between humankind and the nature from which it has sprung. Here, once again in defending the communists of the Second International, we offer a more general defence of marxism against some its more recent "critics", above all the petty bourgeois radicalism that lies at the origins of feminism and ecologism, which have now become fully-fledged instruments of the dominant ideology.

Bebel and the "woman question ", or Marxism against feminism

We have already mentioned that the enormous popularity of Bebel's Woman and Socialism lay to a great extent in the fact that this work took the "woman question" as a point of embarkation for a theoretical journey towards a socialist society, whose geography was to be described in some detail. It was primarily as a guide to this socialist landscape that the book had such a powerful impact on the contemporary workers' movement. But this does not mean that the question of women's oppression was merely a convenient hook or artifice. On the contrary, it was a real and growing concern of the proletarian movement of that period: it is no accident that Bebel's book was more or less coterminous with Engels' Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (see the article in this series in International Review no. 81).

It will be necessary to emphasis this point, because for certain crude versions of feminism - particularly the kind that has flowered among the radical intelligentsia in the USA - marxism itself is just another patriarchal ideology, an invention of those "Dead White Males" who have nothing to say about the oppression of women. The most thoroughgoing of these feminist-feminists will even argue that marxism can be dismissed instantly because Marx himself was a Victorian Husband and Father who secretly sired an illegitimate son on his housekeeper. We will not waste any time here refuting the latter argument since it amply reveals its own banality. But the idea that marxism has nothing to say on the "woman question" does need to be dealt with, not least because it has been leant some weight by certain economistic and mechanical interpretations of marxism itself.

We have placed the term "woman question" in inverted commas up till now not because this question does not exist for marxism, but because it can only be posed as a problem for humanity, as the problem of the relationship between men and women, and not as a question apart. From the very beginning of his work as a communist, legitimately inspired by Fourier's insights on this matter, Marx posed the question as follows: "The immediate, natural and necessary relation of human being to human being is also the relation of man to woman. In this natural species relationship man's relation to nature is directly his relation to man, and his relation to man is directly his relation to nature, to his own natural function. Thus, in this relation is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for man and to which nature has become human nature for him. From this relationship man's whole level of development can be assessed. It follows from the character of this relationship how far man had become, and has understood himself as, a species being, a human being" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, "Private Property and Labour").

Here, the man-woman relationship is placed in its fundamental natural and historical framework. The passage was written against those misconceived notions of communism which argued for (or accused communists of arguing for) a "community of women", the total subordination of women to male lust. On the contrary, a really human life could only be attained when relations between men and women were free of all taint of domination and oppression - and this was only possible in a communist society.

This theme was constantly reiterated throughout the subsequent evolution of rnarxist thought. From the Communist Manifesto's denunciation of the hypocritical bourgeois cant about the eternal values of the family - values which capitalist exploitation was itself constantly undermining - to the historical analysis of the transformation of family structures in different social systems contained in Engels' Origins of the Family, marxism had sought to explain not only that the particular oppression of women was a reality, but also to locate its material and social origins in order to point the way to its supercession (see International Review no. 81). In the period of the Second International, these concerns were taken up by the likes of Eleanor Marx, Klara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai and Lenin. Opposed to bourgeois feminism which, like its latter day incarnations, aimed to dissolve class antagonisms into the gaseous concept of "sisterhood", the Socialist parties of this period also recognised the need for a particular effort to draw proletarian women, who were often cut off from productive and associated labour, into the struggle for the social revolution.

In tins context, Bebel's Woman and Socialism was a definite landmark in the marxist approach to the problem of women's oppression. The following first-hand account illustrates graphically the impact the book had in challenging the rigidities of the sexual division of labour in the "Victorian" age - rigidities which were also present and operational in the workers' movement itself: "Although I was not a Social democrat I had friends who belonged to the party. Through them I got the precious work. I read it nights through. It was my own fate and that of thousands of my sisters. Neither in the family nor in public life had I ever heard of all the pain the woman must endure. One ignored her life. Bebel's book courageously broke with the old secretiveness. I read the book not once but ten times. Because everything was so new, it took considerable effort to come to grips with Bebel's views. I had to break with so many things that I had previously regarded as correct" (Ottilie Baader, cited in Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, Pluto Press 1983, p 97).

Baader went on to join the party, which is of seminal importance: by laying bare the real origins of their oppression, Bebel's book had the effect of bringing proletarian women (and men) into the struggle of their class, the struggle for socialism. The immense impact the book had in its day can be measured by the number of editions it went through: 50 between 1879 and 1910, including a number of revisions and translations.

In its more developed editions, the book is divided into three parts - woman in the past, in the present and in the future, thereby conveying the essential strength of the marxist method: its capacity to situate all the questions it examines in a broad historical framework which also points the way to the future resolution of existing conflicts and contradictions.

The first part, "Woman in the past" does not add a great deal to what Engels put forward in his Origins of the Family. In fact, it was the publication of Engels' work which led Bebel to revise his first version, which had rather tended towards the idea that women had been "equally" oppressed in all previous societies. Engels, following Morgan, had demonstrated that this oppression had developed in a qualitative manner with the emergence of private property and class divisions. Thus Bebel's revised edition was able to show the link between the rise of the patriarchal family and that of private property: "With the dissolution of the old gentile organisation, the influence and position of women sank rapidly. The mother-right vanished; the father-right stepped into its shoes. Man now became a private property holder: he had an interest in children, whom he could look upon as legitimate and whom he made the heirs of his property: hence he forced upon woman the command of abstinence from intercourse with other men" (Bebel, Schocken paperback edition, 1971, p28).

The most important parts of the book are the next two sections: the third, as we have seen (see International Review no. 84) because it broadened out into a general vista of the future socialist society; the second because, on the basis of extensive research, it aimed to prove concretely how the existing bourgeois society, for all its pretensions about freedom and equality, ensured the perpetuation of woman's subordination. Bebel demonstrated this not only with regard to the immediately political sphere - women were denied the vote even in the majority of the" democratic" countries of the day, let alone in Junker-dominated Germany - but also in the social sphere, in particular the sphere of marriage, where woman was subordinate to the man in all matters - financial, legal, and sexual. This inequality applied to all classes but struck the proletarian wife with added force, since apart from all the pressures of poverty she also frequently suffered the dual obligation of daily wage labour and the unending demands of domestic work and childrearing. Bebel's detailed depiction of how the combined stresses of wage and domestic labour ruthlessly undermined the possibility of harmonious relationships between men and women has a remarkably contemporary feel, even in the age of the so-called "Liberated Woman" and of the "New Man".

Bebel also shows that if "marriage presents one side of the sexual life of the capitalist or bourgeois world, prostitution presents the other. Marriage is the obverse, prostitution the reverse of the medal" (p146). Bebel angrily denounces this society's hypocritical attitude to prostitution; not only because bourgeois marriage, in which the wife - above all in the upper classes - is virtually bought and owned by the husband, is itself akin to a legalised form of prostitution, but also because the majority of prostitutes are proletarian women forced "downwards" out of their class by the economic constraints of capitalism, by poverty and unemployment. And not only this: the respectable bourgeois society, which brings women to this state in the first place, unfailingly punishes the prostitute and protects the "client", especially if he is from the upper reaches of that society. Particularly odious were the police "hygiene" checks on prostitutes which not only humiliated the women under examination but had no worth whatever in halting the spread of venereal diseases.

Between marriage and prostitution, bourgeois society was completely unable to provide human beings with the bases of sexual fulfilment. No doubt some of Bebel's pronouncements on sexual behaviour reflect the prejudices of his day, but their underlying dynamic is definitely towards the future. Anticipating Freud, he argued forcefully that the repression of the sexual drive leads to neurosis: "It is a commandment of the human being to itself - a commandment that it must obey if it wishes to develop normally and in health - that it neglect the exercise of no member of its body, deny gratification to no natural impulse. The laws of the physical development of man must be studied and observed, the same as those of mental development. The mental activity of the human being is the expression of the physiological composition of its organs. The complete health of the former is intimately connected with the health of the latter. A disturbance of the one inevitably has a disturbing effect on the other. Nor do the so-called animal desires take lower rank than the so-called mental ones. This holds good for man as for woman" (p80). Freud, of course was to take such insights onto a much deeper level1. But the particular strength of marxism is that, on the basis of such scientific observations of human needs, it is able to show that a truly healthy human being can only exist in a healthy society, and that the real cure for neurosis lies in the social rather than the purely individual domain.

In the more directly "economic" sphere, Bebel shows that, for all the reforms achieved by the workers' movement, for all its gains in eliminating the early excesses of female and child labour, women workers continue to suffer particular hardships: precariousness of employment, lower wages, employment in unhealthy and dangerous trades. Like Engels, Bebel recognised that the extension and industrialisation of female labour was playing a progressive role in freeing women from the sterility and isolation of domestic chores, creating the bases for proletarian unity in the class struggle. But he also showed the negative side of this process - the particularly ruthless exploitation of female labour and the increasing difficulty faced by proletarian families in the care and education of their children.

Evidently, for Bebel, for Engels, in short for marxism, there is indeed a "woman question" and capitalism is unable to provide the answer to it. The seriousness with which the question was taken up by these marxists amply demonstrates the hollowness of the crude feminist idea that marxism has nothing to say on such matters. But there are much more sophisticated versions of feminism. The "socialist feminists", whose main mission was to draw the "women's liberation movement" of the 60s into the orbit of established leftism are perfectly capable of "recognising the marxist contribution" to the problem of women's liberation - only to "prove" the existence of gaps, flaws or errors in the classical marxist approach, so requiring the subtle admixture of feminism to arrive at a "total critique".

The criticisms such "socialist feminists" make of Bebel's work are fairly indicative of this approach. In Women's Estate, Juliet Mitchell, having acknowledged that Bebel had advanced Marx and Engels' understanding of woman's role by pointing out how her maternal function had served to place her in a position of dependency, then complains that "Bebel too was unable to do more than state that sexual equality was impossible without socialism. His vision of the future was a vague reverie, quite disconnected from his description of the past. The absence of a strategic concern forced him into voluntarist optimism divorced from reality" (p80, Penguin Books, 1971).

A similar charge is levelled in Lise Vogel's Marxism and the Oppression of Women, certainly one of the most sophisticated attempts to find a "marxist" justification for feminism: Bebel's vision of the future "reflects a utopian socialist outlook reminiscent of Fourier and the other early nineteenth-century socialists" (p101); his strategic approach is contradictory, so that Bebel could not "despite his best socialist intentions, sufficiently specify the relationship between the liberation of women in the communist future and the struggle for equality in the capitalist present" (p103). Not only is there no connection between today and tomorrow: even his view of tomorrow is flawed, since "socialism is pictured largely in terms of the redistribution of goods and services already available in capitalist society to independent individuals, rather than in terms of the wholesale reorganisation of production and social relations" (p102). This idea that "even socialism" doesn't go far enough in the direction of women's liberation is a common refrain amongst feminists: Mitchell for example, cites Engels on the necessity for society to collectivise domestic labour (through the provision of communal facilities for cooking, cleaning, childcare and so on) and concludes that both Marx and Engels had an "overly economistic stress" (opcit) to what is fundamentally a question of social relationships and their transformation.

We shall have something to say about the problem of "utopianism" during the period of the Second International. But let us make it perfectly clear that such a charge is inadmissible from the feminists. If a problem of utopianism emerges in the workers' movement of that time, it is because of the difficulties of seeing the link between the immediate defensive working class movement and the future communist goal. But for the feminists this connection is not provided at all by the movement of the proletariat, by a class movement, but by an "autonomous women's movement" which claims to cut across class divisions and provide the missing strategic link between the fight against women's inequality today and the construction of new social relations in the future. This is the most important "secret ingredient" which all the socialist feminists want to add to marxism. Unfortunately, it's an ingredient which can only spoil the dish.

The working class movement of the 19th century did not and could not take exactly the same form as it has in the 20th. Operating within a capitalist society which could still grant meaningful reforms, it was legitimate for the social democratic parties to put forward a minimum programme containing demands for economic, legal, and political improvements for women workers, including the granting of suffrage. It's true that the social democratic movement was not always precise in its distinction between immediate aims and final goals. There are ambiguous formulations in both The Origins of the Family and Woman and Socialism in this respect, and a well-read "socialist feminist" like Vogel does not hesitate to point these out. But fundamentally, the marxists of the day understood that the real significance of the fight for reforms was that it united and strengthened the working class and so schooled it in the historic struggle for a new society. It was for this reason above all that the proletarian movement always opposed bourgeois feminism: not merely because it limited its aims to the horizons of present-day society, but because far from aiding the unification of the working class, it sharpened divisions within it and led it off its own class terrain altogether.

This is truer than ever in the period of capitalism's decay, where bourgeois reform movements can no longer have any progressive content at all. In this period, the minimum programme no longer applies. The only real "strategic" question is how to forge the unity of the class movement against all the institutions of capitalist society in order to prepare for the latter's overthrow. Sexual divisions within the class, like all others (racial, religious, etc), evidently weaken the movement and have to be fought at every level. but they can only be fought with the methods of the class struggle - through unity in struggle and organisation. The feminists' demand for an autonomous women's movement can be seen as a direct assault on such methods; like black nationalism and other so-called "movements of the oppressed", it has become an instrument of capitalist society for exacerbating the divisions within the proletariat.

The perspective of a separate women's movement, seen as the only guarantee of a "nonsexist" future, actually turns its back on the future and ends up fixating on the most immediate and particular "women's" issues such as maternity and childcare - which in fact only have a real future when posed in class terms (for example, the demands of the Polish workers in 1980). It is thus fundamentally reformist. The same goes for that other "radical" feminist critique of marxism: that the marxist emphasis on the need to transfer childcare and domestic chores of all kinds from the individual to the communal sphere is "overly economist".

Throughout this series we have attacked the idea that communism is anything but the total transformation of social relationships. The feminist claim that communism does not go far enough, does not look beyond politics and economics to the true overcoming of alienation, is not merely false: it is a direct adjunct to the leftist programme of state capitalism, since the feminists unfailingly point to the existing "socialist" models (China, Cuba, formerly the USSR, etc) to prove that economic and political changes aren't enough without a conscious struggle for women's liberation. In short: the feminists set themselves up as a pressure group for state capitalism, its "anti-sexist" conscience. The symbiotic relationship between feminism and the "male dominated" capitalist left is proof enough of this.

For marxism, however, just as the political seizure of power by the working class is only the first step towards the inauguration of a communist society, so the destruction of commodity relations and the collectivisation of production and consumption, in short the "economic" content of the revolution, merely provides the material base for the creation of qualitatively new relations between human beings.

In his "Commentaries on the 1844 Manuscripts", Bordiga eloquently explains why this must be the case in a society that has completed the alienation of human relations, not least sexual relations, by subordinating them all to the domination of the market. "The relationship between the sexes in bourgeois society obliges the woman, starting from a passive position, to make an economic calculation each time she accedes to love. The male makes this calculation in an active fashion by making a balance sheet of a sum allotted against a need satisfied. Thus in bourgeois society not only are all needs expressed in money - as in the male's need for love - but, for the woman, the need for money kills the need for love" (Bordiga et la passion du communisme, Spartacus, 1972, p156). There can be no supercession of this alienation without the abolition of the commodity economy and the material insecurity which goes with it (an insecurity felt first and foremost by the female). But this also requires the elimination of all the social-economic structures that reflect and reproduce the market relationship, in particular the atomised family household which has become a barrier to the real fulfilment of love between the sexes: "In communism without money, love will, as a need, have the same weight for both sexes and the act which consecrates it will realise the social formula that the other's human need is my human need, to the extent that the need of one sex is realised as the need of the other. This cannot be proposed simply as a moral relationship founded on a certain physical connection, because the passage to a higher form of society is effected in the economic domain: the care of children is no longer just the concern of the two parents but of the community" (ibid).

Against this materialist programme for the genuine humanisation of sexual relationships, what do the feminists, with their claim that marxism doesn't go far enough, have to offer?By negating the question of revolution - of the absolute necessity for the political and economic overturn of capital - feminism "at best" can offer no more than a "moral relationship founded on a certain physical connection", in short, moralistic sermons against sexist attitudes or utopian experiments in new relationships inside the prison of bourgeois society. The true poverty of the feminist critique is probably best summed up in the atrocities of "political correctness", where the obsession to change words has exhausted all passion to change the world. Feminism thus reveals itself as yet another obstacle to the development of a truly radical consciousness and action.

The landscape of the future

a) False radicalism in green

Feminism is not alone in its "discovery" of marxism's failure to get to the root of things. Its close cousin, the "ecology" movement, makes the same claim. We have already summarised the "green" critique of marxism in a previous article in this Review ("It's capitalism that is poisoning the Earth", International Review no. 63): put simply, the argument is that marxism, like capitalism, is just another ideology of growth, expressing a "productionist" view of man and an alienated view of nature.

This trick is usually performed by assimilating marxism with Stalinism: the hideous state of the environment in the former "Communist" countries is cited as the true legacy of Marx and Engels. There are, however, more sophisticated versions of this trick. Disenchanted councilists, Bordigists and others who are now flirting with primitivism and other greeneries know that the Stalinist regimes were capitalist, not communist; and they are also aware of the profound insights into the relationship between man and nature contained in the writings of Marx, in particular the 1844 Manuscripts. Such currents therefore concentrate their fire on the period of the Second International, a period in which Marx's dialectical vision was allegedly buried without trace, to be replaced by a mechanistic approach which passively worshipped bourgeois science and technology and placed the abstract "development of the productive forces" above any real programme of human liberation. The intellectual snobs of Aufheben specialise in elaborating this view, particularly in their long series attacking the notion of capitalist decadence. Kautsky and Lenin are often cited as the chief offenders, but Engels himself does not escape the whip.

b) The universal dialectic

This is not the place to deal with these arguments in detail, particularly since we want to focus, in this article, not on philosophical issues but on what the socialists of the Second International said about socialism, about the society they were fighting for. Nevertheless, a few observations about "philosophy", about the general world view of marxism, would not go amiss, since it does connect to the way in which the workers' movement dealt with the more concrete question of the natural environment in a socialist society.

In previous articles in this series, we have already showed how Marx viewed the question, both in his early and his more mature work (see International Review nos. 70,71 and 75). In the dialectical view, man is a part of nature, not some" being squatting outside the world". Nature, as Marx put it, was man's body and he could as well live without it as a head without a body. But man was not "just" another animal, a passive product of nature. He was a uniquely active, creative being who alone among the animals was capable of transforming the world around him in accordance with his needs and desires.

It is true that tile dialectical view was not always clearly understood by Marx's followers, and that as various bourgeois ideologies infested the parties of the Second International, these viruses also expressed themselves on the "philosophical" terrain. In a period in which the bourgeoisie was marching triumphantly forward, the notion that science and technology, in themselves, contained the answer to all of humanity's problems became an adjunct to the development of reformist and revisionist theories within the movement. But even the more "orthodox" marxists were not immune: some of Kautsky's work, for example tends to reduce human history to a purely natural scientific process in which the victory of socialism becomes virtually automatic. Similarly, Pannekoek has shown that some of Lenin's philosophical conceptions reflected the mechanical materialism of the bourgeoisie. But, as the comrades of the Gauche Communiste de France pointed out in their series on Pannekoek's Lenin as Philosopher (see International Review nos. 25, 27,28, and 30), even if Pannekoek made some pertinent criticisms of Lenin's ideas about the relationship between human consciousness and the natural world, his basic method was flawed, because he himself made a mechanical link between Lenin's philosophical errors and the class nature of Bolshevism. The same applies to the Second International in general. Those who argue that it was a bourgeois movement because it was influenced by the dominant ideology have no understanding of the workers' movement in general, of its unceasing combat against the penetration of the ideas of the ruling class within its ranks, nor the particular conditions in which the parties of the Second International themselves waged this struggle. The social democratic parties were proletarian in spite of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois influences which affected them to a greater or lesser extent at different moments in their history.

We have already shown, in the previous article in this series, that Engels was certainly the foremost exponent and defender of the proletarian vision of socialism during the early years of social democracy, and that this vision was defended by other comrades against the deviations that evolved later on in this period. The same applies to the more abstract question of man's relationship to nature. From the early 1870s to the end of his life Engels was working on The Dialectics of Nature, in which he tried to encapsulate the marxist approach to this question. The essential thesis in this wide-ranging, but incomplete work, is that both the natural world and the world of human thought follow a dialectical movement. Far from placing humanity outside or above nature, Engels affirms that "at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like something standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature,and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly" ("The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man", which is part of The Dialectics of Nature).

However, for a whole strand of academic "marxists" (the so-called Western Marxists, who are the real mentors of Aufheben and the like), The Dialectics of Nature is the theoretical source of all evil, the scientific justification for the mechanical materialism and reformism of the Second International. In a previous article in this series (see International Review no. 81) we have already given some elements of a response to these charges; that of reformism in particular was dealt with at more length in the article on the centenary of Engel's death in International Review no. 83 (see also the Communist Workers Organisation's rebuttal of the notion of a split between Marx and Engels in Revolutionary Perspectives no. 1, series 3). But restricting ourselves to the terrain of "philosophy", it is worth noting that for "Western Marxists" like Alfred Schmidt, Engels' argument that the "cosmic" and the "human" dialectic are at root one and the same is a species not merely of mechanical materialism but even of "pantheism" and "mysticism" (cf The Concept of Nature in Marx, 1962). Schmidt here was following the example of Lukacs, who also argued that the dialectic was restricted to the "realms of history and society" and criticised the fact that "Engels -following Hegel's mistaken lead - extended the method to apply also to nature" (note 6, p 24, in History and Class Consciousness, Merlin Press, 1971).

In fact this charge of "mysticism" is groundless. It is true, and Engels himself recognises this in The Dialectics of Nature, that some pre-scientific world outlooks, such as Buddhism, had developed genuine insights into the dialectical movement both in nature and in the human psyche. Hegel himself had been strongly influenced by such approaches. But while all these systems remained mystical in the sense that they could not go beyond a passive vision of the unity between man and nature. Engels' view, the view of the proletariat, is active and creative. Man is a product of the cosmic movement. But, as the above passage from "The part played by labour..." emphasises, he has the capacity - and this moreover as a species and not merely as an illuminated individual - to master the laws of this movement and so to use them to change and direct it.

At this level, Lukacs and the "Western Marxists" are wrong to counter-pose Engels to Marx, since both agreed with Hegel that the dialectical principle "holds good alike in history and natural science" (Marx, letter to Engels, cited in Revolutionary Perspectives, opcit). The inconsistency of Lukacs' criticism can moreover be seen in the fact that in this same work he approvingly cites two of Hegel's key sayings: that "truth must be understood and expressed not merely as substance but also as subject", and that "truth is not to treat objects as alien" (pp39 and 204 of History and Class Consciousness, quoting the preface from The Phenomenology of Mind and Werke, XII, p207). What Lukacs fails to see is that these sayings clarify the real relationship between man and nature. Whereas both pantheistic mysticism and mechanical materialism tend to see human consciousness as the passive reflection of the natural world, Marx and Engels grasped that it is in fact - above all, in its realised form as the self-awareness of social humanity - the dynamic subject of the natural movement. Such a viewpoint presages the communist future where man will no longer treat either the natural or the social world as a series of alien, hostile objects. We can only add that the developments of the natural sciences since Engels' day - particularly in the field of quantum physics - have added considerable weight to the notion of a dialectic of nature.

Civilisation, but not as we know it

As good idealists, the greens often explain capitalism's propensity for destroying the natural environment as the logical outcome of the bourgeoisie's alienated view of nature; for marxists, the latter is fundamentally the product of the capitalist mode of production itself. Thus the battle to "save the planet" from the disastrous consequences of this civilisation is situated first and foremost not at the level of philosophy, but at the level of politics, and demands a practical programme for the reorganisation of society. And even if, in the 19th century, the destruction of the environment had not yet reached the same catastrophic proportions that it has in the later part of the 20th, the marxist movement recognised from its inception that the communist revolution involved a very radical reshaping of the human and natural landscape to make up for the damage inflicted on both by the unrestrained onslaught of capitalist accumulation. From the Communist Manifesto to the later writings of Engels and Bebel's Woman and Socialism, this recognition was summarised in the formula: abolition of the separation between town and country. Engels, whose first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, had railed against the poisonous living conditions that capitalist industry and housing imposed on the proletariat, returned to this theme in Anti-Duhring: " ... abolition of the antithesis between town and country is not merely possible. It has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself, just as it has become a necessity of agricultural production and, besides, of public health. The present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country; and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease. It is true that in the huge towns civilisation has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of. But it must and will be got rid of, however protracted a process it may be. Whatever destiny may be in store for the German Empire of the Prussian nation. Bismarck can go to his grave proudly aware that the desire of his heart is sure to be fulfilled: the great towns will perish" (Anti-Duhring,Part III, third part: "Production", p 351-2 of 1975 Moscow edition).

Furthermore, this "centralised decentralisation" is only possible because "capitalist industry has already made itself relatively independent of the local limitations arising from the location of sources of the raw materials it needs. Society liberated from the barriers of capitalist production can go much further still. By generating a race of producers with an all-round training who understand the scientific basis of industrial production as a whole, and each of whom has the practical experience in a whole series of branches of production from start to finish, this society will bring into being a new productive force which will abundantly compensate for the labour required to transport raw materials and fuel from great distances".

Without putting into question the understanding that this new society will be based on the most advanced technical developments. Bebel also anticipates that "Each community will, in a way, constitute a zone of culture; it will, to a large extent, itself raise its necessaries of life. Horticulture, perhaps the most agreeable of all practical occupations, will then reach fullest bloom. The cultivation of vegetables. fruit trees and bushes of all nature, ornamental flowers and shrubs - all over an inexhaustible field for human activity in a field, moreover, whose nature excludes machinery almost wholly" (ibid, p317).

Thus Bebel looks forward to a society which is highly productive but which produces at a human pace: "The nerve-racking noise, crowding and rushing of our large cities with their thousands of vehicles of all sorts ceases substantially: society assumes an aspect of greater repose" (ibid, p 300).

Here Bebel's portrait of the future is very similar to that of William Morris, who also used the image of the garden and who gave his futuristic novel News from Nowhere the alternative title "An Epoch of Rest". In his characteristically straight-forward style, Morris explained that all the "disadvantages" of the modem cities, their filth, their crazy rush and hideous appearance, were the direct product of capitalist accumulation, and could only be eliminated by eliminating capital: "Again. the aggregation of the population having served its purpose of giving people opportunities of inter-communication and of making the workers feel their solidarity, will also come to an end; and the huge manufacturing districts will be broken up, and nature heal the horrible scars that man's heedless greed and stupid terror have made for it will no longer be a dire necessity that cotton cloth should be made a fraction of a farthing cheaper this year than last" ("The society of the future", Political Writings of William Morris. p 196).

We could add that, as an artist, Morris had a particularly sharp concern to overcome the sheer ugliness of the capitalist environment and to remould it according to the canons of artistic creativity. This is how he posed the question in a speech on "Art under Plutocracy": "And first I must ask you to extend the word art beyond those matters which are consciously works of art, to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colours of all household goods, nay even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend it to the aspect of all the externals of our life. For I must ask you to believe that every one of the things that goes to make up the surroundings among which we live must be either beautiful or ugly, either elevating or degrading to us, either a torment and burden to the maker of it to make, or a pleasure and a solace to him. How does it fare therefore with our external surroundings in these days? What kind of an account shall we be able to give to those who come after us of our dealings with the earth, which our forefathers handed down to us still beautiful, in spite of all the thousands of years of strife and carelessness and selfishness?" (Political Writings of William Morris, p 58).

Here Morris poses the question in the only way a marxist can pose it: from the standpoint of communism, of the communist future: the degrading external appearance of bourgeois civilisation can only be judged with the greatest severity by a world in which every aspect of production, from the smallest household good to the design and laying out of the physical landscape, is carried out, as Marx put it in the 1844 Manuscripts, "in accordance with the law of beauty". In this vision, the associated producers have become the associated artists, creating a physical environment that answers to mankind's profound need for beauty and harmony.

c) The Stalinist perversion

We have mentioned that the ecologists' "critique" of marxism is based on the false identification between Stalinism and communism. Stalinism embodies the capitalist destruction of nature and justifies it with marxist rhetoric. But Stalinism has never been able to leave the basics of marxist theory untouched; it began by revising the marxist conception of internationalism and it has gone on to attack every other fundamental principle of the proletariat, more or less explicitly. It is the same with the demand for abolishing the distinction between town and country. The Stalinist hack who introduces the 1971 Moscow edition of The Society of the Future, an extract from Bebel's Woman and Socialism, explains how Bebel (and thus Marx and Engels) have been proved wrong on this point: "The experience of socialist construction also does not confirm Bebel's statement that with the abolition of the antithesis between town and country, the population will move from the big towns to the country. The abolition of the antithesis between town and country implies that ultimately there will be neither town nor country in the modern meaning of the word. At the same time it is to be expected that big towns, even though their nature will change in developed communist society, will preserve their importance as historically evolved cultural centres".

The "experience of socialist construction" in the Stalinist regimes merely confirms that it is the tendency of bourgeois civilisation, above all in its epoch of decline, to herd more and more human beings into cities which have swelled beyond all human proportions, far outstripping the worst nightmares of the founders of marxist theory, who already thought the cities of their day were bad enough. The Stalinists have turned marxism on its head here as everywhere else: thus Romania's despot Ceaucescu proclaimed that the bulldozing of ancient villages and their replacement by gigantic "workers' tower blocks" was the practical abolition of the antithesis between town and country. The most pertinent answer to these perversions is provided by Bordiga in his "Space against Cement", written in the early 1950s. This text is a passionate denunciation of the sardine-like conditions imposed on the majority of humanity by capitalist urbanism, and a clear reaffirmation of the original marxist position on this question: "When, after the forcible crushing of this ever-more obscene dictatorship, it will be possible to subordinate every solution and every plan to the amelioration of the conditions of living labouraathen the brutal verticalism of the cement monsters will be made ridiculous and will be suppressed, and in the immense expanses of horizontal space, once the giant cities have been deflated, the strength and intelligence of the human animal will progressively tend to render uniform the density of life and labour over the inhabitable parts of the earth; and these forces will henceforth be in harmony, and no longer ferocious enemies as they are in the deformed civilisation of today, where they are only brought together by the spectre of servitude and hunger" (published in Espece Humaine et Croute Terrestre, Petite Bibilotheque Payot, p168).

This truly radical transformation of the environment is more than ever necessary in today's period of capitalist decomposition, where the megacities have not only become more and more swollen and uninhabitable, but have become the nodal points of capitalism's growing threat to the whole of planetary life. The communist programme is, here as in all other domains, the best refutation of Stalinism. And it is also a slap in the face to the pseudo-radicalism of the "greens", which can never go beyond a perpetual dance between two false solutions: on the one hand, the nostalgic dream of a backward flight into the past, which finds its most logical expression in the apocalypses of the "green anarchists" and primitivists, whose "return to nature" can only be founded on the extermination of the majority of mankind; and, on the other hand, the small-scale tinkering "reforms" and experiments of ecology's more respectable wing (tactically supported by the primitivists in any case), who seek purely piecemeal solutions to all the particular problems of modem city life - noise, stress, pollution, overcrowding, traffic jams and the rest. But if human beings are dominated by the machines, transport systems and buildings that they themselves have erected, it is because they are trapped in a society where dead labour dominates living labour at every turn. Only when mankind regains control over its own productive activity can it create an environment compatible with its needs; but the premise for this is the forcible overthrow of the "increasingly obscene dictatorship" of capitalism - in short, the proletarian revolution.

***

In the next articles in this series, we will examine how the late 19th century revolutionaries foresaw the most crucial of all social transformations - the transformation of "useless toil" into "useful work", in other words the practical overcoming of alienated labour. We will then return to the charge that has been levelled at these visions of socialism - that they represent a relapse into pre-marxist utopianism. This in tum will lead us onto the issue that was to become the major preoccupation of the revolutionary movement in the first decade of this century: not so much the problem of the ultimate goal of the movement, but of the means to attain it.

CDW

1 In this passage by Bebel, the relationship between physiology and mental states is presented in a somewhat mechanical manner. Freud took the exploration of neurosis onto a new level by showing that the human being cannot be understood as a closed mental/physical unit, but extends outwards into the field of social reality. But it should be remembered that Freud himself started with a highly mechanical model of the psyche and only later developed towards a more social, and a more dialectical view, of man's mental development.